Original Reactions

Edmund Gosse (1917)

• ‘All Scandinavia rang with Nora’s declaration of independence.’

• ‘People left the theatre, night after night, pale with excitement, arguing, quarrelling, challenging’

Edith Lees Ellis (1889)

• 'A woman should demand her own emancipation and leave her husband and children in order to get it, savoured less of sacrifice than sorcery’

Henrik Ibsen (1880)

• ‘Down here A Doll’s House has caused the same commotion as at home.’

• ‘People have come out passionately either for or against the play, and it has scarcely ever happened in Munich before that a drama has been so vehemently discussed as this’

Frances Lord

• ‘Such furious discussion did Nora rouse when the play came out that many a social invitation given in Stockholm during that winter bore the words’

• ‘You are requested not to mention Ibsen’s Doll’s House!’

Fredrik Peterson (1880)

• 'Having seen something profoundly ugly we are left only with a distressing feeling, which is the inevitable consequence when there is no reconciliation to demonstrate the ultimate victory of the ideal’

M.V Brun (1879)

• ‘Hideous…such screaming dissonances that no beautiful harmony capable of resolving them exists…we are left in the most painful mood, literally disgusted by a catastrophe which in the crudest manner depart from ordinary humanity in order to exalt the untrue, that which is equally outrageous in aesthetic, psychological and dramatic terms.’

M.V Brun (1879) - 2

• ‘I ask you directly: is there one mother among thousands of mothers, one wife among thousands of wives, who would behave as Nora behaves, who would desert husband, children and home merely in order to become ‘human being’?’

M.V Brun (1879) - 3

• ‘I answer with conviction: no and again no!’

Left-Wing Danish Newspaper

• ‘Our own life, our own everyday life has here been placed on stage and condemned! We have never in dramatic or poetic form seen a better, more powerful intervention in the question of women’s liberation!”

Left Wing Danish Newspaper - 2

• ‘There are thousands of such doll-homes, where the husband treats his wife as a child he amuses himself with, and so that is what the wives become…it is this young and delightful young woman’s duty, her inescapable duty, to leave this gentleman, this husband, who slowly sacrifices her on the altar of his egotism, and who fails to understand her value as a human being’