Guðrún Árnadóttir frá Lundi was a farmer’s wife with three children and a writer of folk novels, popular with readers, and disapproved of by critics. She was born and grew up in cramped conditions on Nordlandet.
Her debut novel Dalalif I-V, 1946-1951, is a family chronicle of over two thousand pages, a broad, epic portrait of society, and was a public success like her subsequent twenty-seven novels, which are set in village communities either on the coast, as in Þar sem brimaldan brotnar, 1955, or inland, as in Tengdadóttirin I-III, 1952-1954.
Human survival during hard times and women’s everyday lives are at the heart of her books, in which she gives practical solutions and reason preference over passion. Her first novels, in particular, have literary qualities and a psychological insight which go beyond the trivial. Her last novel, which was published when she was eighty-six years old, is still a popular work.
