Recommendations
Books Like Ghosts
Best books to read after Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's 1882 most scandalous play — Mrs. Alving's catastrophic day of recognition about her dead husband's secret life, her son Oswald's inherited syphilis, and the mercy killing question — was banned in England for twenty years and denounced across Europe as obscene and immoral. These recommendations extend the experience through Ibsen's other major plays, through the European theatrical tradition of social problem drama, and through fiction and drama that investigates the past's presence in the present and the cost of respectability.
- 1Buy
A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen
The essential predecessor and companion — the wife who left, whose decision Ghosts then interrogates. Ibsen wrote Ghosts as a response to the controversy around A Doll's House: Mrs. Alving is the wife who did not leave, who stayed and 'did her duty,' and Ghosts shows what that duty costs. The two plays are Ibsen's two possible outcomes for the woman in an impossible marriage, and they must be read together.
- 2Buy
Hedda Gabler
by Henrik Ibsen
The later psychological companion — where Ghosts is about repression and its consequences (what staying costs), Hedda Gabler is about will and its perversions (what refusing to stay costs). Both plays are organized around a woman whose exceptional intelligence cannot find adequate expression in the world assigned to her, but the forms of their destruction are mirror images: Mrs. Alving is destroyed by submission; Hedda by refusal.
- 3Buy
Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill
The American companion and the most important inheritor of Ghosts' formal method — the Tyrone family's terrible day and night of accusation and recognition. Long Day's Journey takes the technique of Ghosts (the past pressing into the present, a single catastrophic day, the gradual revelation of what has been concealed) and gives it the expressionistic form that American theater had developed. O'Neill explicitly acknowledged Ibsen as his primary influence.
- 4Buy
All My Sons
by Arthur Miller
Miller's 1947 companion in the American tradition of the social problem play about the secrets that families keep — Joe Keller's wartime sale of defective airplane parts and its consequences. All My Sons is the most directly Ibsenite of Miller's plays: the gradual revelation of a crime, the consequences for the family, the question of what responsibility requires. Miller said of Ibsen: 'He taught me that it was possible to put the workings of society on the stage.'
- 5Buy
The Wild Duck
by Henrik Ibsen
The companion from the same period — the play in which Ibsen interrogates the very idealism about truth that Ghosts endorses. Ghosts shows the cost of concealing the truth; The Wild Duck shows the cost of revealing it. Reading them in order shows the development of Ibsen's thinking about the relationship between honesty and happiness in his most fertile period.
- 6Buy
Miss Julie
by August Strindberg
The Swedish contemporary companion — the one-act play about class, desire, and the destruction of the aristocratic Julie. Miss Julie and Ghosts are the two great Scandinavian naturalist plays of the 1880s: both were denounced as obscene, both dealt with sexual subject matter that the Victorian stage had excluded, and both used the new technique of naturalistic theater to show social and moral consequences that respectable society preferred to ignore.
- 7Buy
Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
Miller's masterwork and the fullest American development of the Ibsenian tradition of the social problem play about the past in the present — Willy Loman's terrible final day. Death of a Salesman takes the formal technique of Ghosts (the past pressing into the present through memory, guilt, and the return of what was repressed) and gives it the expressionistic form of Willy's intrusive memories — the past made visible on stage, not just discussed.
- 8Buy
Strindberg Plays: One
by August Strindberg
The Swedish companion volume — Miss Julie, The Father, and The Dance of Death, the three most important Strindberg plays for readers coming from Ibsen. Strindberg wrote in direct competition and dialogue with Ibsen, and his plays represent the other great strand of Scandinavian naturalist theater: where Ibsen's plays tend toward the morally complex (who is right?), Strindberg's tend toward the psychologically brutal (who survives?).
More Ghosts Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.