Hedda Gabler

Newly married and already suffocating, Hedda Gabler has settled into a handsome villa with George Tesman — an amiable, plodding scholar she wed out of boredom and the fear of being left on the shelf. She is the late General Gabler's daughter: beautiful, well-born, intelligent, proud, and offered by the world of 1890 no outlet for any of it but a marriage she despises and a coming motherhood she cannot bear to name.

Into this stagnant household come the people who will break it. Eilert Lovborg, a gifted, once-dissipated scholar reformed by the gentle Thea Elvsted, has written a brilliant new manuscript he calls his child. Judge Brack, worldly and insinuating, wants to install himself as the third corner of the marriage. And Hedda, with nothing worthy to do with her considerable powers, begins to exercise the one power within her reach: the power to tempt, to interfere, and to push a human life toward destruction.

Built with watchmaker's precision around General Gabler's pistols — shown in the first scene and fired in the last, the loaded gun made into the spine of a tragedy years before Chekhov named the rule — Hedda Gabler is the most concentrated and chilling form of the realist drama Ibsen brought into being. At its centre stands one of the supreme and most contested roles in the modern theatre: a woman who is neither the wronged wife of melodrama nor a simple villain, but a riddle — caged and magnificent, cruel and trapped, a brilliant creature spoiling better lives because her own has nowhere to grow.

Is she a villain or a victim? Ibsen refuses to settle it, and the refusal is the play's lasting power. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation, by Edmund Gosse and William Archer, 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.