AshehougAgency

A Bourgeois Girl

After her death, the daughters of live-wire Helene Haave find a pile of jottings she has made about her life. She has written of her childhood, her relations with her parents, her strict, middle-class upbringing, her sense of loss and deprivation following the wartime death of her father - and of her striving to create a world of her own. Her parents' rigid control has left its mark, so that every step she takes towards developing her own personality becomes a struggle to overcome her inhibitions. All this notwithstanding, she acquires a sound education, a loving husband and three independently minded daughters. But why does she find it so hard to get on with them? Is it because the pattern of her own childhood is fated to repeat itself in successive generations? Tordis Ørjasæter has here produced an unobtrusive, thoughtful and insightful novel that many readers will identify and empathise with.

First published: 2001, Aschehoug Fiction

Tordis Ørjaseter: Biography and bibliography