Victoria

This beautiful and moving story of young love was hailed by the New York Times as ‘a sustained feat of shimmering lyricism’. The lovers are Johannes, the miller’s son, and Victoria, daughter of the lord of the manor. Their brief moment of ecstasy is as transitory as their dreams. Separated forever by their stations in society, they live their lives apart, forced by circumstances into perverse cruelty to one another. Only in the last, tragic pages do we see that Victoria cannot live without her Johannes.


Born in 1859, Knut Hamsun's early works were forceful and polemic before he became more compassionate, drawing inspiration from the country people of his native Norway. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil. He has been recognised as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.