Jenny Winge has come to Rome to paint, but what she's really hunting is something harder to capture: an authentic life. Surrounded by fellow Bohemians who worship Beauty as a religion, she drifts through ancient streets and turbulent affairs, mistaking intensity for depth and passion for salvation. When her romantic entanglements begin to trap rather than liberate her, Jenny faces the terrifying question at the heart of all radical freedom: how much is she willing to sacrifice to remain unbound? Sigrid Undset traces her protagonist's psychological dissolution and hard-won recovery with a novelist's precision and a psychoanalyst's unflinching gaze. This 1911 novel, written when Undset was just twenty-eight, stands as an early, bracing exploration of existential choice and its costs. For readers who crave fiction that doesn't flinch from the darker corridors of the human heart.
X-Ray
