A Doll's House

About this book

A Doll’s House is a three-act play by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, written in 1879 while he was living in Italy and Germany. It belongs to the sequence of prose plays about contemporary middle-class life that Ibsen began with The Pillars of Society in 1877 and that made him the most discussed playwright in Europe. It was published in Danish-Norwegian in Copenhagen in December 1879 and staged there within weeks.

The play caused an immediate scandal because of its ending, and in several countries early productions were forced to change it. It is now one of the most performed plays in the world. Its hold comes from a structure as tight as a detective story and from a central character whose change over three acts is still startling to watch.

The story

Nora Helmer is a cheerful young wife and mother in a comfortable Norwegian home. Her husband, Torvald, a lawyer, has just been appointed manager of a bank, and the family’s money worries seem to be over. Torvald treats Nora as a pet, calling her his little songbird and squirrel, and she plays the part.

Nora has a secret. Years earlier, when Torvald was dangerously ill and needed a stay in the south, she borrowed money without his knowledge, since a married woman could not legally borrow on her own, and she has been paying it back from her housekeeping allowance ever since. The lender is Nils Krogstad, a clerk at Torvald’s bank whom Torvald intends to dismiss. Krogstad’s threat to expose the loan, and the way Nora obtained it, drives the play toward a confrontation between husband and wife.

Themes and historical context

Ibsen wrote the play at a time when Scandinavian and European debate about women’s legal position was intensifying. Married women in Norway had limited rights over property and contracts, and Nora’s loan is illegal for reasons the audience of 1879 would have recognized at once. Ibsen later said he had not written the play as propaganda for women’s rights, but as a study of a human being, and both readings have persisted.

The title’s image of a doll’s house refers to a marriage in which one partner is treated as a toy. Over the three acts Nora comes to see her situation clearly, and the play’s final scene, a long conversation between husband and wife, was unlike anything audiences had seen in serious theater. The dramatist’s method, in which a past secret surfaces and forces a reckoning in the present, is one Ibsen refined over many later plays.

Early German productions, under pressure from the leading actress, used an alternative ending that Ibsen wrote reluctantly and described as a barbaric outrage against the play. The original ending was soon restored and is the one performed today.

Who should read it

The play is short, around 25,000 words, and reads easily in an evening. Sharp’s translation is in plain Edwardian English and is clear, if sometimes stiff compared with newer versions. It is a good first play for readers who have not read drama since school, and it pairs well with any discussion of marriage, money, or the position of women in the nineteenth century. Readers should expect a domestic setting, a small cast, and dialogue that carries all the action.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #2542 uses the English translation by R. Farquharson Sharp, prepared for Gutenberg by Martin Adamson and David Widger. Sharp’s translations of Ibsen were published in the Everyman’s Library series in the early twentieth century.