Join us on Weds 29th October at 130pm for our first visiting speaker seminar of the year.
Venue: Arts 103 (Constance Naden Room)
‘Recovering Laura Kieler–The Real Woman behind Ibsen’s A Doll’s House’
For the past four years, Tzen Sam, Kirsten Shepherd, and Gaye Kynoch have been researching the life and work of Laura Kieler, the unwitting model for Nora in A Doll’s House. Kieler was a friend and fellow writer whose private problems Ibsen dramatized in his 1879 play without her knowledge, creating lasting challenges for her to overcome due to the scandal when her personal life was made public. She responded to A Doll’s House through a play of her own, entitled Men of Honour(1890), which dramatizes a male writer callously exploiting a young woman and a vulnerable child for his own success. Ibsen responded nearly a decade later in his last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), which speaks directly to the concerns expressed by Kieler.
This talk is taking place a few weeks ahead of the publication of the first English translation of Men of Honour alongside two new translations of A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken, all by Gaye Kynoch in a volume edited by Kirsten Shepherd and Tzen Sam for OUP in their Oxford World’s Classics series in November 2025. In the talk we explore the life of Laura Kieler and trace her complex, ongoing interactions with Ibsen conducted across several decades and, most intriguingly, through these plays in which they speak to one another.
KIRSTEN E SHEPHERD is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Her scholarship on Ibsen includes Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900 (1997), Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), and numerous book chapters and articles, particularly on Ibsen’s engagement with science and on the French translation and performance history of his plays.
TZEN SAM is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford studying Ibsen’s first female English translators, the women who played an important but largely unacknowledged role in the transmission and reception of Ibsen’s plays in Britain.
