The Wild Orchid (book)

[3] The Wild Orchid, set in Norway shortly before and then up to the First World War, tells the first part of the story of Paul Selmer.

According to reviewer Vergilia Peterson Ross, the flower from which the book derives its title, The Wild Orchid, serves "as a symbol of human disillusion;" she continued, "When young Paul ... first hears the wild orchid’s name, gymnadenia, he imagines a redolent, sweet blossom of dazzling form.

Several noted both comparisons and contrasts with Undset's earlier series Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken set in medieval Norway.

Reviewer Mary Kolars wrote of The Wild Orchid, by comparison, that "this, soberer, less glamorous chronicle confirms one’s sense of the novelist’s truly extraordinary powers.

There is the same encompassing, inexhaustible knowledge of each separate soul ..."[6] In an article about The Wild Orchid published in 1930 in the journal Die Schildgenossen (a journal of the Catholic Youth Movement in Germany), the Catholic author Ida Friederike Görres observed that despite the contrast between the dramatic medieval setting of the earlier two series by Undset, "grand, warlike, and wild," and the "small, bourgeois, and tame" setting of The Wild Orchid, what connects these novels by Undset is that "the encounter with God is always the same.