A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone Looking back at Austrian author Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night

The Bruce Chatwins, Paul Therouxs and Ryszard Kapuscinskis of the world may be the more celebrated travel authors, but that doesn’t mean there is a lack of women explorers and writers. To that formidable list, add Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night, published in German in 1938, and translated into English by Jane Degras in 1954. But for Christiane, an artist, the Arctic was just another word for “freezing and forsaken solitude”, and she did not follow her husband immediately when he wrote to her, “Leave everything as it is and follow me to the Arctic.” A year at Grey Hook, Spitsbergen But soon she got his diaries which described journeys by water and over ice, of the animals and the fascination of the wilderness, the strange light over the landscape, and “the strange illumination of one’s own self in the remoteness of the polar light”. She begged her husband and Karl to spare his life; when she freed him from a trap, she could never forget his look: “I speak tenderly to him, but the horror does not fade from his eyes.” It was during several days of a furious storm when she was alone in the hut that she realised the true power of nature; it dawned on her that in many cases it may be more difficult for a man to retain his ordinary humanity in the Arctic than to sustain his life in battle with the elements. “A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone,” she would say, “then you will come to realise what’s important in life and what isn’t.” The writer looks back at one classic every month.