About the work
Henrik Ibsen wrote The Lady from the Sea in Munich in 1888; the five-act play was published by Gyldendal in Copenhagen and Christiania on 28 November 1888, again in an edition of 10,000 copies. It had two premieres on the very same evening, on 12 February 1889, at the Hoftheater in Weimar and at the Christiania Theatre, where Bjørn Bjørnson directed and the Gundersen couple took the leads.
Plot
Young Ellida Wangel, a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter, is married to the widowed Dr Wangel but secretly longs for the sea and for a stranger to whom she once promised herself before he had to flee after killing a man. When the sailor returns years later and urges her to leave with him, Wangel grants her complete freedom to choose. Ellida consciously chooses her life on land, and the stranger departs.
Cultural significance
Unlike the coolly received Rosmersholm before it, the play met a warmer response, which contemporaries attributed to its more conciliatory ending. It stands as one of Ibsen’s most psychologically nuanced works on female self-determination and free will, with the sea running through it as a constant image of untamed longing.