The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen

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Title: Hedda Gabler
Play In Four Acts

Author: Henrik Ibsen

Translator: Edmund Gosse and William Archer

Release Date: May, 2003 [Etext #4093]
Posting Date: January 4, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEDDA GABLER ***

Produced by Douglas Levy, for Nikki

HEDDA GABLER

By Henrik Ibsen

Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer

Introduction by William Archer

INTRODUCTION.

From Munich, on June 29, 1890, Ibsen wrote to the Swedish poet, Count
Carl Soilsky: "Our intention has all along been to spend the summer in
the Tyrol again. But circumstances are against our doing so. I am at
present engaged upon a new dramatic work, which for several reasons has
made very slow progress, and I do not leave Munich until I can take with
me the completed first draft. There is little or no prospect of my being
able to complete it in July." Ibsen did not leave Munich at all that
season. On October 30 he wrote: "At present I am utterly engrossed in
a new play. Not one leisure hour have I had for several months." Three
weeks later (November 20) he wrote to his French translator, Count
Prozor: "My new play is finished; the manuscript went off to Copenhagen
the day before yesterday.... It produces a curious feeling of emptiness
to be thus suddenly separated from a work which has occupied one's time
and thoughts for several months, to the exclusion of all else. But it is
a good thing, too, to have done with it. The constant intercourse with
the fictitious personages was beginning to make me quite nervous." To
the same correspondent he wrote on December 4: "The title of the play is
_Hedda Gabler_. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate
that Hedda, as a personality, is to be regarded rather as her father's
daughter than as her husband's wife. It was not my desire to deal in
this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was
to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a
groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the
present day."

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