Henrik Ibsen - Life & Career

Early life...

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born in Skien on 20 March 1828. His father, Knud, was a wealthy merchant and importer, and his mother, Marichen Altenburg, came from an affluent family. Skien is a coastal town in the province of Telemark; at the time of Ibsen's birth it was prospering from a boom in the shipping trade. Henrik was the oldest surviving child; his elder brother, Johan Altenburg Ibsen, died at the age of only one and a half years, three weeks before Henrik's birth. Knud and Marichen Ibsen had four more children in the next seven years: Johan Andreas in 1830, Hedvig Cathrine in 1831, Nicolai Alexander in 1834, and Ole Paus in 1835.

Initially, the Ibsen family lived in a spacious villa, well suited for a grand life and entertaining. This opulent life ceased when Knud Ibsen's failures in financial speculations led to bankruptcy. Henrik was seven when the villa was sold and the family was forced to move to the large farm they owned, Venstøp, several miles out of town. Henrik's mother turned to religious musings and pursuits; his father started to drink excessively; and the Ibsen children were isolated from their former milieu. Henrik, the sensitive, vulnerable oldest son, became increasingly introverted. Encouraged by his mother, he started to stage puppet theater. He also read widely, drew, and painted. He felt himself an outsider, and suffered from his family's reduction in wealth, lack of unity, loss of happiness, and pervading sense of sorrow.

Following on...

• 1844 Christmas, became an apothecary’s apprentice in anoter small town, Grimstad immersed himself in Shakespeare and Ludvig Holberg’s classics.
• Ibsen began to write, he met a girl called Clara Ebbel  whom he wrote his first love poems for.
• After a short duration, Ibsen broke up with Clara and began having a relationship with the apothecary’s servant woman, Else Sophie Jensdatter who, like Ibsen, had a family that ‘suffered financial reverses and adversity.’  In 1846, his first child was born – a boy named Hans Jacob Henriksen who later became a skilled blacksmith, but he died destute.
• 1848 – revolution to France and Europe  inspired Ibsen, he wrote his first play – a blank verse tragedy called Catilina which was published in 1850.
• Before moving to Christiania (now Oslo), he visited his family in Skien for the last time. He only kept in contact with his sister, Hedvig. The university entrance exams he took during that time caused him to fail in Greek and mathematics, and thus ‘[depriving] the world of a doctor, but decided the future path of the young playwright.’
• He began working as a journalist, devoting himself exclusively to his writing, this gave him many ‘valuable insights into the contemporary society as well as experiences he drew on his later writings.’
• 1850s, Ibsen wrote several new poems including ‘Bjergmanden (the miner)’, in this poem, ‘the hero hammers his way through the rock of the earth to reach the heart of Nature.’ Many critics believed that this was a metaphor for his vision of the work as literary artist, they have also made the link between this poem and the play of 1896 about a miner’s son, John.
• 1877, Ibsen received honorary degree from University of Uppsala.
• In 1899, Ibsen's authorship ended, statues to Ibsen and Bjørnson were erected ouseid the Norwegian National Theatre.
• In 1900, Ibsen suffered his first stroke. He never fully recovered, and several smaller strokes forced him to give up his writing and his daily walks. 
• Ibsen died on 23 May 1906. 

Final Words...
Henrik Ibsen is both a pathbreaking dramatist of supreme significance and his country's greatest literary artist. In addition to such poetic masterpieces as Brand and Peer Gynt, he authored the cycle of twelve plays, including Et Dukkehjem, Vildanden, and Hedda Gabler, that form the basis for his reputation in the English-speaking world, and, even more so, the foundation of modern European drama. Studied and performed on every continent and with far-flung artistic and social significance, Ibsen is a towering presence both in world literature and in the world of the theater. 

 

Sæther, Astrid. "Henrik Ibsen." Norwegian Writers, 1500 to 1900. Ed. Lanae H. Isaacson. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 354. Literature Resource Center. Retrieved 11/02/2011