In the Library
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen, 1910
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by R. Farquharson Sharp
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 26k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Antigone
Sophocles
Sophocles staged the first woman who defied the rules of her world, twenty-four centuries before Nora slammed the door.
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Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen returns to the trapped wife, but Hedda has no door to walk through and reaches for the pistol instead.
£1.99
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
The Awakening does the same thing, following a woman waking up to the smallness of the role marriage has handed her, though in prose rather than on a stage.
£1.99
About the book
Torvald Helmer calls his wife his little skylark, his little squirrel, his little spendthrift, and Nora chirps and twirls and lets him, because the warmth of the cage is real and she has not had reason to test the bars. What he does not know is that this fluttering, frivolous creature once forged a signature to borrow the money that saved his life, and has been repaying it for years out of the housekeeping he never thought to count. Ibsen winds the first two acts like a thriller, a woman racing to keep a secret from spilling into the open; when it spills, what it lays bare is not her deceit but his. His outrage, all wounded pride dressed as love, shows the marriage for the pretty arrangement it always was, built to keep something small and grateful, never to shelter a person. By the end a door closes in a Norwegian sitting room, and the sound of it travelled across every stage in Europe, the report of a woman stepping, for the first time, into her own life.