A Doll's House

It is Christmas in the Helmer household, and money is about to be easy. Torvald, a lawyer newly made manager of a bank, dotes on his pretty young wife Nora — his squirrel, his songbird, his little spendthrift — and Nora trips happily through the house buying presents and being fondly scolded. But Nora has a secret. Years before, to save Torvald's life, she secretly borrowed money she could not raise honestly, forging her dying father's signature on the bond, and she has been quietly repaying it ever since.

When her creditor — a disgraced clerk about to be dismissed by Torvald — realises the forged bond gives him a hold over the manager's wife, the secret begins, scene by pressurised scene, to rise toward the surface. Nora waits in terror for the "wonderful thing": that when the truth comes out, her husband will nobly take her guilt upon himself. What Torvald actually does when he learns the truth — first turning on her in selfish fury, then, the danger past, magnanimously forgiving her — shows Nora at last that she has spent eight years as a plaything, never once treated as an equal soul.

So she does the thing that scandalised Europe: she sits her astonished husband down and talks to him, for the first time, as one adult to another, and then she leaves — her marriage, her home, and her three young children — to go and find out who she is. The slam of the front door behind her became "the door slam heard round the world," and A Doll's House the founding work of modern realist drama and a permanent landmark in the argument over women's autonomy.

Built with watchmaker's precision out of ordinary domestic conversation, and so disturbing in its conclusion that Ibsen was pressured into writing — and then disowning — a softened alternative ending, the play has never left the stage. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation, by R. Farquharson Sharp, in clean, readable typesetting for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.