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Mrs Alving is about to open an orphanage in memory of her late husband, a respected captain whose dissolute life she hid from everyone, including her son…
Mrs Alving is about to open an orphanage in memory of her late husband, a respected captain whose dissolute life she hid from everyone, including her son. When Osvald comes home from Paris, ill and despairing, the lies of the past come back like ghosts, and the pious Pastor Manders, who once sent her back to her marriage, has to face what his advice cost.
Context and significance
Published in 1881, Ghosts caused a scandal across Europe for openly discussing inherited disease, religious hypocrisy and the duties of marriage, and theatres refused to stage it for years. Its last scene, at sunrise, is one of the most devastating in Ibsen. Read A Doll's House first.
About the author
Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was born in Skien in Norway; his family lost its money when he was a boy, and at fifteen he became a pharmacist's apprentice. He worked in theatres in Bergen and Christiania with little success, and then spent twenty-seven years in Italy and Germany, where he wrote his greatest works.
His verse dramas Brand and Peer Gynt were followed by realistic prose plays about modern life, A Doll's House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, which shocked audiences and changed theatre forever. He is often called the father of modern drama.