Reading Order
Hedda Gabler Reading Order
Hedda Gabler (1890, premiered 1891) by Henrik Ibsen is the most psychologically complex of his late plays and the most purely theatrical — Hedda Tesman, née Gabler, in the first weeks of her marriage to the amiable academic George Tesman, suffocating in the respectability she has married and destroying the people she cannot bear to see exceeding her. The play is a study in constraint — social, gender, class — and in what constraint does to a person of exceptional intelligence and will. Hedda has no legitimate outlet for her ambition and no legitimate means of self-definition; she uses the only power available to her (manipulation, beauty, the power of someone who doesn't care if she destroys herself) to create a work of art whose medium is other people's lives. Ibsen refused to explain her, refused to moralize about her, and refused to offer any perspective on her actions that the audience could comfortably adopt — which is why she is the most performed female character in the theatrical canon and the most endlessly discussable.
Where to start
Hedda Gabler (1891) — the complete play in one of the standard modern translations: Michael Meyer (Methuen), Christopher Hampton (Faber), Barbara Bray (Oxford), or Brian Johnston (Smith and Kraus). For Ibsen reading order: A Doll's House → Ghosts → An Enemy of the People → The Wild Duck → Hedda Gabler → The Master Builder
Complete Hedda Gabler Book List
- 1Buy
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen·1891·The masterwork — Hedda Tesman's destruction of Eilert Løvborg and his manuscript, and her final act. The most performed female role in the classical theatrical canon, and the most psychologically dense of Ibsen's late plays - 2Buy
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen·1879·The essential earlier companion — Nora Helmer's recognition that she has been a doll in her husband's house, and the act of self-liberation that Hedda Gabler refuses to perform. A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler are the two poles of Ibsen's investigation of women and freedom: Nora slams the door; Hedda shoots herself. Reading them together illuminates both - 3Buy
The Wild Duck
Henrik Ibsen·1884·The necessary companion in the tradition of the play organized around the gap between the ideal and the real — Gregers Werle's idealism destroying the Ekdal family, with the wild duck as the central symbol. The Wild Duck is the Ibsen play that most directly interrogates the plays (like A Doll's House) that argue for the liberating power of truth — asking what happens to ordinary people when the truth is applied - 4Buy
Miss Julie
August Strindberg·1888·The Swedish contemporary companion — the one-act play about class, desire, and the seduction of the aristocratic Julie by the valet Jean. Miss Julie and Hedda Gabler are the two great Scandinavian plays of the 1880s-90s about gender and class and the impossibility of authentic existence within social structures, and Strindberg (who hated Ibsen with a consuming personal passion) wrote Miss Julie partly in response to A Doll's House - 5Buy
Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov·1901·The Russian companion in the theatrical tradition of the woman trapped by convention — the Prozorov sisters who cannot get to Moscow. Three Sisters and Hedda Gabler are companion investigations of women of exceptional intelligence whose ambition cannot find adequate expression in the world they inhabit, but Chekhov's sisters endure their constraint while Hedda destroys herself and those around her - 6Buy
The Awakening
Kate Chopin·1899·The American contemporary companion — Edna Pontellier's gradual awakening to her own desires and to the impossibility of living them within the constraints of her marriage and her society. The Awakening was published in 1899, eight years after Hedda Gabler, and explores the same territory: the woman who cannot conform to what the social world requires of her, who has no outlet for her exceptional intelligence and desire, and who is destroyed by the contradiction between what she is and what she is permitted to be - 7Buy
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton·1905·Wharton's companion in the tradition of the novel about a woman who cannot conform to the social world that formed her — Lily Bart's gradual exclusion from the New York society that is her only possible world. Lily Bart and Hedda Gabler are companion studies in the destruction of a woman who has been educated by her society only to be a beautiful ornament, and who cannot survive when the social world withdraws its support - 8Buy
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw·1913·Shaw's 1912 comedy companion — Higgins's transformation of Eliza Doolittle and its unexpected consequences. Pygmalion is the comic counterpart to Hedda Gabler's tragedy: where Hedda's story asks what happens to a woman who refuses the identity that society assigns her, Pygmalion asks what happens to a woman who is assigned a new identity without being consulted about what she wants from it. Shaw learned from Ibsen and wrote Pygmalion as a deliberately lighter-toned exploration of the same feminist territory
Hedda Gabler — Frequently Asked Questions
What does Hedda Gabler want?
Hedda Gabler wants power, beauty, and freedom — the three things her world as a respectable married woman cannot give her. Specifically, she wants the freedom she associated with her father, General Gabler: horses, pistols, the aristocratic world of male action and command. She wants Eilert Løvborg to write a work of genius that will be a monument to human freedom (what she calls 'vine leaves in his hair'). And she wants to control the destinies of those around her — to have power over others' lives in the absence of any power over her own. The tragedy is that all these desires are legitimate desires for a person of her intelligence and will, but every outlet for them in her world (marriage to Tesman, manipulation of Løvborg, her relationship with Judge Brack) is corrupt or constrained, and the only act of genuine freedom available to her is the one she ultimately takes.
Why does Hedda Gabler burn Løvborg's manuscript?
Hedda burns Løvborg's manuscript — which she describes as 'burning your child' — for several interconnected reasons that Ibsen deliberately refuses to reduce to one. First, she is consumed by jealousy of Thea Elvsted, who has been Løvborg's intellectual companion and has helped him write the manuscript; the manuscript represents the kind of intimate intellectual collaboration and genuine partnership that Hedda cannot have in her world. Second, she has encouraged Løvborg to die 'beautifully' — with a pistol, freely — and the manuscript's existence complicates her vision of his death. Third, the destruction of the manuscript is the most extreme act of the power she has been denied: she cannot create beauty, but she can destroy it. Ibsen gives us all these motivations simultaneously, and the play's power depends on the viewer not being able to reduce Hedda's action to any single one of them.
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.