As I have pointed out in the introduction to Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea is the first play in which Ibsen entirely abandons social satire and devotes himself to pure psychology. It is also the first play in which he trenches on the occult. He was to go much further in this direction in The Master Builder and Little Eyolf; but already he pursues the plan, which was also Hawthorne’s, of carefully leaving us in doubt as to whether, and how far, any supernormal influence is at work. On the whole, however, he probably intends us to conclude that the Stranger’s uncanny power over Ellida exists only in her imagination.
[1]. Condensed from an article in the Fortnightly Review, September 1885.
[2]. See note (in the Norwegian and German editions) to Ibsen’s Letters, No. 146. As to Charlotte Stieglitz, see Brandes’ Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. vi., p. 296 (London, Heinemann, 1905).
[3]. The date is July 16. On March 5 of the same year he had (as we shall see later) written down the first outline of what was afterwards to become The Lady from the Sea.
[4]. Published in Die neue Rundschau, December 1906. The same magazine contains a first draft of A Doll’s House. It appeared too late to be noticed in the Introduction to that play.
[5]. I met in Rome, in 1881-82, when Ibsen was living there, a minor official of the Vatican Library, then a middle-aged man, who had written eighteen or twenty tragedies, all of which I saw in exquisite manuscript. One of them, Coriolano, had been acted once, on the day, I think, before the Italian troops entered Rome in 1870. Is it possible that Ibsen, too, had come across this rival dramatist?
[6]. The name originally assigned her was “Thora.” Readers who know anything of Norway will probably realise how absolutely right was the substitution of “Ellida.” It is a masterstroke in the art of nomenclature.
[7]. It is suggested that the coincidence is to be regarded as part of the “occult” atmosphere of the play. But I doubt whether this was in the poet’s mind; and, in any case, the defence does not seem a very good one.