Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Works of Henrik Ibsen: Little Eyolf; John Gabriel Borkman; When We Dead Awaken; An Enemy of the People; The Wild Duck
Little Egolf was written in Christiania during 1894, and published in Copenhagen on December 11 in that year. By this time Ibsen's correspondence has become so scanty as to afford us no clue to what may be called the biographical antecedents of the play. Even of anec dotie history very little attaches to it. For only one of the characters has a definite model been suggested. Ibsen himself told his French translator, Count Prozor, that the original of the rat-wife was a little old woman who came to kill rats at the school where he was edu cated. She carried a little dog in a bag, and it was said that children had been drowned through following her. This means that Ibsen did not himself adapt to his uses the legend so familiar to us in Browning's Pied Piper of H amelin, but found it ready adapted by the popular imagination of his native place, Skien. This idea, Ibsen continued to Count Prozor, was just what I wanted for bringing about the disappearance of Little Eyolf, in whom the infatuation1 and the feebleness of his father are reproduced, but concentrated, exaggerated, as one often sees them in the son of such a father.
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