The superficial and excitable temperament of the French during the century has produced variations of the type of contriving, vivacious little coquettes; the two great German authors, Goethe and Keller, created the thoughtless, sensuous child of nature; John Bull has so conscientiously simplified himself since the Renaissance that he is no longer able to create any type of human womanhood, his women are elves and Medusas; and as for the women in the new Scandinavian literature, with the exception of Strindberg’s hyenas and Ibsen’s “thinking women,” they can hardly be said to occupy a very prominent position. Strindberg’s fates are ghastly vampires who suck the blood of horror-stricken man. They are not to be described in words, it would require the art of a great painter to represent them as they appear in all the unreal reality of their being.--There still remains Ibsen’s woman. Ibsen’s woman holds her sway throughout Europe, and that is in itself a sufficient reason for us to study her as she is represented in his works, and as she stands before us in real life. II “Hedda Gabler,” Ellida (_The Lady from the Sea_), Rebecca (_Rosmersholm_), Gina, Hedvig (_The Wild Duck_), Fru Alving (_Ghosts_), Nora (_The Doll’s House_), Petra (_An Enemy of the People_), Selma (_The League of Youth_), Lona (_The Pillars of Society_), Solveig (_Per Gynt_), Agnes (_Brand_), Swanhild (_Love’s Comedy_)--here are the women whom Ibsen has created, since he became Ibsen, the seeker, the analyser, the doubter. Their first and universal characteristic is that they are all misunderstood. Their second and equally universal characteristic is that they are either unmarried or else unhappily married, the result in either case being discontent; _ergo_ we have the thinking woman, the reading woman, the self-cultured woman, or in other words, the _bourgeoisie_ with plenty of spare time on her hands. Ibsen’s earliest period belongs to the traditional historical drama, which owed its origin to Germany; the romantic, lyrical and dramatic poems, _Brand_ and _Per Gynt_, thrust themselves between with their contingent of angel-women who acted as deliverers of men; and all his other productions as an author were the result of his criticisms of society, or more correctly, his criticisms of the middle class. He was the bourgeois who rebelled against his surroundings, who raised the scorpion scourge against the flesh of his people and the ideals of his world. In his writings the middle class saw themselves reflected as in a looking-glass. Each one of his writings contains the dissection of a bourgeois ideal, and it is always through a woman of the bourgeois class that the result is seen.