ADH critical quotes

Chris Megson, 2010

calls ADH “the best-known play in the Naturalist pantheon”

Toril Moi, 2008

notes that the ending is “a moment of high melodrama”

Toril Moi, 2008, on marriage

ADH is “a play that asks what it will take for two modern individuals to build a relationship based on freedom, equality, and love”

Hugh Stutfield

complained that “the woman of the new Ibsenite neuropathic school is not only mad, but does her best to drive others mad too.”

Max Nordau, 1895

accused Ibsen of “personal perversity”, objecting that “the idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave taking” had “become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes.”

Edmund Gosse, 1879

ADH is “really a domestic family drama, dealing with contemporary problems in regard to marriage.”

Terry Otten, 1998

“the play is elementally about prostitution, about the wilfull selling of oneself to gain some advantage.”