Hedda Gabler (Author Biography)

Author Biography

At the time Henrik Ibsen wrote and published Hedda Gabler(1890) he was sixty-two and a well-established but highly controversial dramatist, but the road to that success had been paved with deprivation and hardship. Although he was born in a well-to-do family in Skien, Norway, on March 20, 1828, financial reversals led to poverty, making Henrik’s youth a dismal one. At sixteen, he began a lonely and unhappy six-year apprenticeship to an apothecary (a pharmacist). He found his principal solace in the theater and writing, which he hoped would provide a means of escaping from his misery.

His first serious attempt at drama, Cataline(1850), earned him the support of friends who helped him escape from drudgery. He moved to Christiania (Oslo), where he undertook an apprenticeship as dramatist with the Bergen National Theatre. He also spent time in Copenhagen, studying at the Royal Theatre.

Ibsen’s first plays borrowed freely from the French intrigue drama that he derided for its artificiality. Hoping to write something new, in 1857 he left the Bergen Theatre to become the director of the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania. The next year, despite his wretched financial state, he married and began a family. Nothing seemed to go right, however. His plays and poetry gained no influential following, and his theater went bankrupt within five years.

Lack of public support forced him into exile. In 1864, he moved to Rome. It was the first major turning point in his long career, for it was as an expatriate that he wrote most of the plays on which his great international reputation was built. Not only did he leave Scandinavia, he left behind a direct participation in theater. While in Italy, he wrote Brand(1866) and Peer Gynt(1867), two important poetic dramas. The former play was an immediate success and helped alleviate Ibsen’s dire poverty.

In 1868, the French invasion of Italy obliged Ibsen to move to Germany, where he began writing the series of plays on which his fame largely rests. He turned from writing mythic-poetic drama to realistic, social-problem drama in prose, starting with The League of Youth in 1869, which, like so many of its successors, caused an uproar when first staged. Although his success was limited, by the time he returned to Rome in 1878, he had permanently freed himself from debt.

In the next year, 1879, he published A Doll’s House, garnering international acclaim and putting him, critically, at center stage. Each succeeding social-thesis play brought increased recognition and notoriety, for each was, in some quarters, condemned. For example, Ghosts(1881) created such a furor that it could not be staged immediately. Others, like An Enemy of the People(1883) and The Wild Duck(1885), though less sensational, still caused critical controversy. Ibsen’s fame and his notoriety spread quickly.

By 1890, when Hedda Gabler was published, he had even become a national hero in Norway. He returned home in 1891, where, before his death, he wrote The Master Builder(1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman(1896), and When We Dead Awaken(1899), dramas that are more symbolic and introspective than any of his previous works. He died on May 23, 1906, widely regarded as the most important dramatist of the age.