A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (1879)

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.