A Woman in the Polar Night

In this extraordinary adventure, a reluctant visitor to the Arctic thrives in the awesome and unforgiving landscape.

In 1933, Christiane Ritter, a painter from Austria, travelled to Spitsbergen, an Arctic island north of Norway, to be with her husband. He had been taking part in a scientific expedition and stayed on to hunt and fish. “Leave everything as it is and follow me to the Arctic,” he wrote to his wife; but for Christiane, “as for all central Europeans, the Arctic was just another word for freezing and forsaken solitude. I did not follow at once.” Eventually she gave in, lured by his compelling stories about the remarkable wildlife and alluring light shows. She says: “They told of journeys by water and over ice, of the animals and the fascination of the wilderness, of the strange light over the landscape, of the strange illumination of one’s own self in the remoteness of the polar night. In his descriptions there was practically never any mention of cold or darkness, of storms or hardships.”