Ebook A Doll's House

Having, by his uncompromising independence of temperament, made Norway too hot to hold him, Ibsen became a voluntary exile in 1864, and did not return to his own country (save for two brief visits) till some five and twenty years afterwards. The first four of these years were spent in Italy, the others mainly in Germany. The effect of a wider life was not long in making itself evident. From Italy Brand and Peer Gynt, two magnificent dramatic poems, came in successive years to astonish Ibsen's compatriots and make him famous. The long demanded pension could no longer be with held, and Ibsen's time of penury was over. In 1877 he began to write the series of prose plays on which his wider reputation rests, the last of them being published in 1900, when their author was an old man of seventy-two.