In the Library
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen, 1891
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer
- Chapters
- Chapters 4
- Length
- Length 26k words
£1.99
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people don't do such things.
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About the book
Two pistols, inherited from a general she could never become, are the only things in the house she handles with any pleasure. Hedda has married a kind, tedious scholar and a future of card evenings and his aunts' slippers, and the boredom in her is a kind of violence looking for somewhere to go. Hedda Gabler gives it somewhere. When a brilliant former admirer reappears, sober and writing the book of his life, she cannot bear that his salvation belongs to another woman, and she begins, almost idly, to arrange a more beautiful ruin: a death with vine leaves in his hair, the Dionysian freedom she was never allowed. Ibsen keeps it all inside one drawing room across four acts, pulling the walls closer until the only move left is the one she makes with the second pistol. Here is a first-rate mind with nowhere to put itself, choosing destruction over a life it can only watch. People don't do such things, a horrified man says at the end. She just did.