# Hedda Gabler

**Author:** Henrik Ibsen
**Tags:** Identity (Psychology), Man-woman relationships, Norwegian drama, Women, Translations into English
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 43
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95891

## Description

Hedda Gabler is Henrik Ibsen's searing 1891 drama of a woman suffocating inside the life she has chosen for herself. Newly married to the earnest but uninspired scholar Jørgen Tesman, Hedda dramatizes the experiences of the title character, the daughter of a general, who is trapped in a marriage and a house that she does not want. Ibsen himself explained that her name signals that she is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife. As old rivalries resurface with the reformed writer Eilert Løvborg and his devoted collaborator Thea Elvsted, Hedda's boredom curdles into a ruthless campaign to control the destinies of everyone around her, wielding her father's pistols as both toy and threat. Her manipulations spiral toward catastrophe, exposing the suffocating constraints placed on women's ambition, sexuality, and selfhood in a rigidly bourgeois society. Often likened to a female Hamlet, Hedda remains one of theater's most magnetic and disturbing creations: a portrait of thwarted power, fierce intelligence, and the terrible cost of a freedom she can only seize through destruction.