| Summary: | During her year in Iceland as an exchange student, the Australian writer Hannah Kent became fascinated with the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir. Kent spent years researching Agnes and the Illugastaðir murders in 1828. She wrote Burial Rites during her Ph.D. research in Creative Writing and her objective was to work against the stereotypes that characterised historical and fictional representations of Agnes, and thereby present a more ambiguous portrait of her protagonist.Burial Rites is a revisionist and feminist historical novel, which presents what Kent terms a “suggestion” of Agnes’s life story. Kent relies on written records related to Agnes’s case, and these provide a historical frame for the narrative, within which Agnes’s story is presented in a poetic first-person narration alongside brief sections with outside perspectives on Agnes. Together these varied perspectives deconstruct the persistent stereotype associated with Agnes. Burial Rites is also very much a novel about Iceland and the North, and thesetting is integral to Kent’s portrayal of Agnes and her ill-fated life. In many ways the book is a dark love letter to Iceland where the landscape, weather and nature are pivotal elements. These are forces that shape and determine the lives of Kent’s characters, especially Agnes’s, because even though landscape and nature grant some joy and solace to Agnes they eventually turn against her, imprison her and bring her towards her inevitable fate. Kent suggests a circular development to Agnes’s story while nature and environment is described in such a way as to foreshadow coming events; also, it is suggested that weather and human destiny are inextricably linked. Finally, the motif of dreams and portends is important in Kent’s representation of Agnes’s story.Keywords: Hannah Kent, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, revisionist feminism, the North, landscape/nature Ástralska skáldkonan Hannah Kent varð heltekin af sögu Agnesar Magnúsdóttur þegar hún dvaldi eitt ár á Íslandi sem skiptinemi. Kent varði mörgum árum í að rannsaka ...
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