There is something irresistible about Hedda Gabler. We hear as much, right at the beginning of the play, in Aunt Julle's heady recollection:

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"How she used to ride along the road with her father, in that long black dress and the feather in her hat..."  An enigmatic introduction indeed!

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But Hedda's magnetism overflows out of the world of the play into reality. Since the play was first published in 1890, the character of Hedda has continued to mesmerize, astonish, and confound the actors who play her, the audiences who watch her, and critics who try to make sense of her.

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Elizabeth Robins, the legendary actress who first staged Hedda Gabler in England and the United States, was captivated by Ibsen's charismatic anti-heroine, drawn to Hedda's "unashamed selfishness; her scorn of so-called womanly qualities; above all, her strong need to put some meaning into her life, even at the cost of borrowing it, or stealing the meaning out of someone else's."

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As a strong-willed, strangely impulsive woman, Hedda is easy to dislike. "Mean, insolent, envious, cruel, fiendish, bully" - these are just some of the choice words that playwright George Bernard Shaw used to describe her in 1913, and these descriptions have stuck around since. Like her or hate her, she is hard to ignore and impossible to forget.

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What makes her so intensely alluring, nearly 150 years later? Perhaps it is as Ibsen himself noted: "With Hedda, there is deep poetry at the bottom." 

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As you try to figure her out, this website can help! Discover more about the inspirations behind Hedda's character. Ask yourself, is she a woman ahead of her time, or perhaps, peculiarly behind it? Delve into the heady worlds of academia, military life and drinking cultures in nineteenth-century Norway, and discover parallels between Northern Europe and North America during that era.​​