Ibsen's Women

This is the first comprehensive study of the women in Ibsen's plays and their relationship to the women in the life and career of the playwright. Through close critical readings of the Ibsen texts, as well as the examination of such primary sources as letters and personal papers, Joan Templeton discovers how the important figures in his life (his family, wife, and the actresses themselves) influenced and informed the powerful and inspiring characters he created. Templeton also explores the importance of the early plays and their impact on the later works, and establishes some general patterns in Ibsen's general representation of women.

Joan Templeton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Long Island University, Brooklyn Center, New York. Templeton is a noted Ibsen scholar and has also published widely on other modern dramatists. She has coedited an anthology of feminist comparative criticism Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), taught extensively in France, and edits Ibsen: News and Comment, the journal of the Ibsen Society of America.