A Woman in the Polar Night Paperback – July 15, 2010

This book is such a beautiful memoir about a woman's soft, quiet inner strength in a dangerous climate that didn't make her weak but stronger. I was truly fascinated by this read, written in the 30s, by an Austrian painter who went to live with her expedition-seeking husband for a year in Spitsbergen - a large and frigid island in the Arctic. She and her husband, along with Norwegian Karl, hold up house/hut for a year and it is certainly an adventure to behold. Christiane Ritter was in her early 30s at the time and wrote this book on her return back to Austria. The writing is eloquent and simple; it's too bad she didn't write more books! Read this one - you will be transported to another place yet frozen in time.

A very well written book describing the beauty of the polar night as well as the frightening storms the author went through, sometimes alone in a small hut. Well worth reading - very compelling!

I loved reading this book, especially during this very hot summer in southern California. I had no idea how beautiful the Arctic is. Maybe other readers will even wish to visit in the winter!

Very positive book. Exciting, well written and intelligent.

Riveting, written in the beauty and starkness of a land revealing its secrets to her - she gives me strength in her isolation and inspiration in her vulnerability.

Though C. Ritter's life was kind of interesting and I enjoyed the descriptions of the Arctic and her interaction with the fox. there is no plot in this book due to the fact it is just her life. Mainly because I was told this was a great story of a woman against the elements, I was a bit disappointed. I also wished I read it in German due to some of the interactions between Mrs. Ritter and her husband.

A compelling story, told with beautifully spare prose, like the landscape itself must have been. It's a lovely description of a crazy adventure on Spitzbergen and its lasting change on a life

Definitely a book to read! Christiane Ritter accounts of her year spent in the North of Svalbard is a travel for the reader'soul back and forth from life to death.

This is a new edition of marvellously written memoir of a year (1934-35) spent in the far north of Svalbard, a Norwegian island high in the Arctic Circle.Against everyone's advice, Christiane Ritter accepted her Austrian husband's invitation to join him in an exceptionally remote and harsh peninsular. She was initially shocked by the ugliness, as she saw it, of the bare landscape, the savagery of the primitive life she had unwittingly thrown herself into, and the distance she felt from her husband - though she only hints at the latter.Things get worse as Christiane, her husband, and an irrepressible young Norwegian, Karl, struggle to survive, to find food in the form of seals or birds to shoot and eat. Left alone in deep winter, 250 miles from the nearest settlement, in minus 30 degrees, while the men hunt for weeks at a time, Christiane finds an awful emptiness tearing at her soul.But she lives through it, and comes to see the stark beauty of land and sea. Nearly all the demands and illusions of ‘European’ life are absent, and this brings a deep sense of freedom.A cruise ship returns a year later to pick her up, full of eager passengers. But 'the Arctic does not yield its secret for the price of a ticket. You must live through the long night, the storms, and the destruction of human pride. You must have gazed on the deadness of all things to grasp their livingness.'The intensity of the experience, including the almost superhuman efforts of the hunters, and the echoing joy of seabirds and icebergs, is memorably captured, in 18 concise chapters.Christiane Ritter was an Austrian artist who was born in 1897, dying in 2000 at the age of 103. This is a new edition of this famous work, with a new foreword, by Sara Wheeler, a polar travel writer.It is striking that none of the three who live at very close quarters in the tiny hut for a year on the Grey Hook peninsular in Svalbard expresses any emotion - or hardly ever. Christiane's husband is closer to his fellow hunter, Karl, than to his wife, and there are only two fleeting mentions of the Ritters' young daughter, left behind in Vienna. Feelings are dangerous as they get in the way of survival. Over the centuries, hundreds of hunters in Svalbard have apparently thrown themselves into the sea because they have become unhinged by the empty landscape. However, on the other side of this nothingness, there is a deep connectedness which needs no expression, which is complete unto itself, and which the busy world needs.

This is one of the best books I have ever read! Beautifully and deftly written, conveying raw nature in such a rich and evocative way, it transformed everything I thought I knew about what it would be like for a woman in the 1930's to survive an Artic winter. The savage hostility of the environment was transcended by her indomitable spirit and deeply sensitive appreciation for every aspect of the way nature was shaping her..she describes it almost like an out of body spiritual experience. I couldn't imagine living for 6 months in complete freezing darkness but the way she conveys the beauty of the ice, the snow, the sea and the mountains and how the reduction of life down to absolute basic survival gave her an astonishing and uplifting sense of her true place in wild nature. A totally extraordinary account, an experience I would love to have the courage to replicate.

Loved this book. We went past the hut during a cruise around Svalbard and having seen it and heard about the book I decided to order it. Evocative of the desolation of the area this memoir was enchanting. Having enjoyed a Summer trip to the area, this is the closest i'll come to spending a Polar Night above 80 degrees North.

Really enjoyed this book. The way it was written you actually felt that you were experiencing the stillness of the long polar winter. She was so brave to experience this as it was very unusual for a woman in the time to do such a thing.

An amazing account written by someone who overwintered in Svalbard (islands north of Norway in the Arctic).