Hedda Gabler

This book has been well reviewed. I just wanted to add that the free public domain book ASIN B004TS5KB8 is in good condition, with only a few proofreading errors and the drop-down table of contents lists each act.

One can understand why the first performances of this play in Christiana elicited mixed responses. Not that the play was badly witten but because Hedda embodies negative qualities that the audience would find destable. A high maintenance, deceitful, conniving woman who would resort to murder without remorse. She didn't marry for love but she certainly had a husband who fell head over heels for her.Ibsen left much to the audiences' imagination on Hedda's motive for giving Eilert Lovborg, her loaded pistol. To protect her doting husband's, George Tesman, interests?Jealousy over her friend's affair with Lovborg?Which ever it was, reading Ibsen's play is always interesting because it gives us a glimpse of life in the 1800s. They did have electricity by the end of the century. But they still resorted to wood stoves to keep the house warm.

Needed it for college courses

Good

Cover art was grainy and weirdly pixelated, but the play is great. Ibsen is amazing (for 1890) at writing female characters.

Ibsen is the absolute champ at creating viable female characters and showing their conflicts and emotional crisis in the fin de siecle. Hedda feels her conflict and the reader has the choice to empathize or not.

Interesting perspective on manipulation of one person by another. Hedda Gabler herself may have charm and beauty, but is not at all a nice person, although in the end she is "honorable"/

I had to read this book for my IB Lang class and I actually really liked this book, though I don't think I will read it again for pleasure.

One of Henrik Ibsen’s most popular plays this is something that actresses just desire to play the part of Hedda. As this opens so Hedda with her husband return home after spending a prolonged honeymoon abroad so that he could study.So we are held entranced as with only a few characters we are really offered here a psychological study of Hedda and we view her impulses and manipulations with intrigue, but also disgust. Afraid of being embroiled in anything that would bring scorn upon herself so she is stuck in a marriage she finds boring and thus plays with other people’s fates.With Hedda and her husband living above their means so their matrimonial happiness is based on expectations, but with an old rival back in the frame so there are worries that these expectations may not be fulfilled. With Hedda encouraging and provoking others so she hopes that she can get back her husband’s chances for a good promotion, but do things really turn out as she hopes?We see behind the characters into what their hopes are and thus we have a woman running away from her husband to be with another man, the power that alcohol has over a dipsomaniac, manipulation and false ideals. With more than one death and the disgrace that could be brought upon our leading character due to her tinkering with other people we see that what is logical to Hedda may not be so to others.This is a really powerful play that makes you really think about many things and how our ambitions and desires may get the better of us if we are too wrapped up in them and live out certain daydreams.

There are three great heroines of nineteenth century literature whose tragedy is that they are denied the dramatic and inspiring lives to which they feel entitled: Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Hedda Gabler.All three are married to men who are certainly adequate from the point of view of ordinary people, but perhaps no more than that; and from the point of view of the life not ordinary, because it belongs on the noble heights of tragic aspiration, adequate is simply not enough.Of the three, Hedda Gabler is the most rarefied in that she is not seeking her transcendence through the love of any particular lover. With her, what she is seeking is a life less banal, to be found in actions of striking nobility or even majesty. Such actions may well be achieved together with, or even through, a man to whom she is linked, but it is the actions, not the man, that matter. What she finds crushing is the triviality of the life of every day, the petty ambitions of the simple bourgeois existence, and the play tracks her final attempts to achieve something greater, their disappointment, and the final realisation that if her life is to be given the noble meaning she seeks, she has to achieve it herself.Powerful in its portrayal of the relations of bourgeois characters to each other, and above all to one figure struggling to rise above them with destructive effect, this fine performance with the outstanding Juliet Stevenson in the title role, brings out all the dramatic tension that Ibsen infused into his play. The play itself retains all its freshness, in particular in its shrewd perception of the limitations on women – so when the great soul lies in a woman's body, its frustration is all the deeper.I wish I hadn’t known the ending from the beginning, but that’s the downside of reading (or in this case listening to) classics: they are part of our cultural backdrop now and the spoilers run through so much other artistic creation all around us.

The last play I read was at school so I thought I would give this a go. It was ok. Easy to read but somehow didn't get it's point across. I had to keep doubling back to see if I had missed something - I hadn't, it just hadn't been written.I had to laugh at some of the earlier reviews. How readers managed to take so much from this play I do not know.To sum up, it's worth a read but it's certainly not great or powerful.

Read enthusiastically as additional ‘fun’ reading by 16 year old taking A level drama and grade 7 LAMDA

I originally bought this cd in order to understand the story as I was auditioning for a part in a local production. It is superb. All the cast are top notch and convey the story of Hedda's great disappointments with her marriage and lot in life. Michael Maloney as her husband is very amusing and you could well understand how his annoying tone and lack of understanding of his wife' frustrations would lead her to do the desperate things she does. For any student of theatre and Ibsen's work this translation is a winner!