Recommendations
Books Like A Doll's House
Best books to read after A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Readers who love A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen are drawn to its combination of feminist argument, psychological precision, and the door slam at the end — they want plays and novels that deal with women's self-determination, the gap between social convention and authentic desire, and the question of what it costs to be free.
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Hedda Gabler
by Henrik Ibsen
The companion late Ibsen play — Hedda Tesman, the pistols, and the offstage shot. The two most frequently staged Ibsen plays and companion investigations of women's position in Norwegian bourgeois society: Nora's ending is the active, hopeful version; Hedda's is the version for the woman who has no equivalent exit
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
The American companion from the same decade — Edna Pontellier in New Orleans. Both The Awakening and A Doll's House are companion investigations of the same problem from 1879 and 1899: both were scandals when published/performed, both organized around the woman who refuses the role her society has assigned her
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Pygmalion
by George Bernard Shaw
Shaw's companion in the tradition of the play about a woman's independence and its costs — Eliza Doolittle's final departure from Higgins. Shaw was deeply influenced by Ibsen, and the ending of Pygmalion is his deliberate echo of Nora's departure: in both cases, the woman refuses to remain the creation that the man has made of her
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The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
The philosophical companion — the most important feminist philosophical text of the twentieth century. A Doll's House and The Second Sex are companion investigations of the same question across 1879 and 1949: Ibsen dramatizes the individual woman's discovery of her unfreedom; de Beauvoir analyzes the philosophical structures that create that unfreedom
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion investigation of what happens to a woman of exceptional intelligence and aspiration in a society organized to waste those qualities. Both A Doll's House and Middlemarch are organized around the question of what a society does to the aspiration of its women, and both arrived at the same moment in the development of the women's question in European culture
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Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
Forster's companion in the literary tradition of the woman who must choose between the life her society expects and the life she actually wants — Lucy Honeychurch choosing between Cecil and George. The comic version where the woman gets to choose and chooses right: Forster's is the hopeful companion to Ibsen's more tragic investigation
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Nora (A Doll's House, Part 2)
by Lucas Hnath
The most interesting theatrical response to Ibsen's play — Nora returns fifteen years later to ask Torvald for a divorce. Hnath asks what happened to Nora after she left, and his answers are more complex than either Ibsen's optimism or the pessimistic counter-narrative allows
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The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
Friedan's 1963 companion investigation of the same problem that Ibsen dramatized in 1879: the gap between what women are told they should want (domestic contentment, the role of wife and mother) and what they actually experience. The Feminine Mystique is the sociological version of A Doll's House: the doll's house that Ibsen showed one woman escaping is the collective situation that Friedan describes eighty years later
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