Scripta manent. Time travel through forgotten words and retrieved information on the tracks of Suzannah 's intellectuality.

Giulia Felisio

Master's thesis in IBS 4390

60 credits

Autumn 2018

Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (ILN),

University of Acknowledgments

This thesis is mainly speaking of written sources, nonetheless this research process was fed by to the consultation with professors willing to give good advice. Their open minds and dedication to the Ibsen studies and humanistic research inspired me, whether in class or in their office.

The Ibsen Centre of the represented for me an intellectual, multicultural and peaceful environment that allowed me to develop my ideas. Its treasures, stored in the library, the many conferences and the valuable teachers and guests make it one of the hotspots of the existing knowledge about Ibsen.

Thanks to prof. Jon Nygaard for inspiring the genesis of my work and following the establishment of its grounds. Thanks to prof. Ruth Schor, for encouraging my progress and for guiding me with patience throughout the development of my research.

As in Turin, here in Oslo, prof. Giuliano D'Amico has always been a model to me: he constantly shows his interest and commitment to research in literary field and his thirst for knowledge goes across the genres. For this research, he inspired me until I improved, in spite of the difficulties that I encountered during the course of my studies. To you, thank you.

Last but not least, thanks to all those friends and family who took care of me, encouraged me to do more and supported me in various ways. To you I dedicate Umberto Eco's words:

To me, a cultured person is not the one who knows when Napoleon was born, but the one who knows where to look for the information in the only moment of his life in which he needs it, and in two minutes.1

Oslo, 9 November 2018

1 “Per me l’uomo colto non è colui che sa quando è nato Napoleone, ma colui che sa dove andare a cercare l’informazione nell’unico momento della sua vita in cui gli serve, e in due minuti” from “Se tutta la conoscenza è un viaggio giocoso”, Stefano Bartezzaghi interviewing Umberto Eco, on Repubblica, 1st September 2003. Scripta manent. Time travel through forgotten words and retrieved information on the tracks of Suzannah Ibsen's intellectuality.

Introduction ...... 1 Note on translations ...... 4 Chapter 1 - Issues and utility of previous works, academic and non-literary material ...... 5 1.1 Methodology ...... 5 1.2 The weight of the letters: Suzannah's correspondence ...... 8 1.3 Reliability of the sources ...... 16 1.3.1 Sӕther's Suzannah. Fru Ibsen ...... 18 1.3.2 Jorunn Hareide's Magdalene Thoresen. En forfatters biografi …...... 19 1.3.3 Michael Meyer's . A biography ...... 20 1.3.4 Bergliot Ibsen's De tre ...... 21 1.3.5 Francis Bull's introductions and articles ...... 24 1.3.6 's Henrik Ibsen. Eit diktarliv ...... 27 hgrt. Chapter 2 - Who is Suzannah? ...... 29 2.1.1 The context she grew up in ...... 30 2.1.2 Suzannah's personality ...... 41 2.1.3 Suzannah's relation with Ibsen, through their love story and economic issues...... 43

Chapter 3 - Suzannah's translations ...... 51 3.1 Suzannah's working context in a tradition of female translators ...... 51 3.2 Translations attributed to Suzannah ...…...... 56 3.2.1 Gustav Freytag's play Graf Waldemar .…...... 57 3.2.2 Gustav Freytag's Die Valentine …...... 60 3.2.3 Karl Gutzkow's Zopf und Schwert ..…...... 61

Chapter 4 - Suzannah's editing activity ...... 69 4.1.1 Suzannah, Ibsen's editor .…...... 71 4.1.2 Suzannah, the intermediary between Ibsen's publisher and “in place” assistent during his absence …...... 74 4.1.3 The Folktales' case .…...... 77 4.1.3.1 The collection of Peder Fylling's tales ...... 79 4.2 Suzannah's move to Italy and her activity abroad ...... 86 4.2.1 Book loans' register ...... 90 Conclusions ..…...... 94 Bibliography ...... 96 Appendix …..…...... 100 Introduction

This thesis presents Suzannah Ibsen as an intellectual, who nurtured her talent in literature and translations, living with Ibsen the development of his authorship. I examined the correspondence with her husband and with their other recipients to demonstrate her literary conscience and activity, in absence of a literary production of her own. Such documents analysed in the first stage of my research have been cross-referred with older sources, for example Ibsen's biographies or diaries written by their acquaintances. Secondly, I compared the material gathered with more recent academical works, to better investigate the reliability of those older sources, suspected to have fallen for the “Ibsen's myth”.2 Although some of the older sources have presented some issues in academical terms of style, references and reliability, I considered those lonely witnesses worth to be looked at, because truth could be restored by cross-referring them with more reliable sources.

Suzannah was born as Susanne Daae Thoresen, after her grandmother. It is curious to observe that Ibsen used to call her “Suzannah”. Her acquaintances, including her step-mother, began to call her “Suzannah” too, after they married. She addressed letters to him as “Dear Ibsen” and signed “your Suzannah”, while in oldest letters she was “Susanna”. Their use of the two different spellings is not discussed in this thesis: however I used both spellings throughout the text to diversify the girl “ante Ibsen” and the intellectual woman she became as Mrs Ibsen.

Susanne Thoresen came from an upper middle-class family, made by the union of two particular personalities: Pastor Hans Conrad Thoresen, a man of great culture and moral, and her Danish stepmother Magdalene Thoresen, who came into her house as a governess first and later became writer. At her time, high class women depended on men for their maintenance, and they needed the permission of a man for them responsible for any activity or economic issue: a very few women could become an author or be recognised as such, even when they had all the features and the right to be that. The education of high-born daughters, even at the highest level consented to them (which was way lower than university, where they did not have access to), was an invest in terms of marriage prospect made by their fathers. Education was not a tool to develop their intelligence or promote their career: two centuries ago, sharp minds like Susanne Thoresen could not enter in universities. Women themselves were not totally aware of their condition: plays like A Doll's House were also attacked by upper-class women, because the patriarchy was deeply-rooted in their society.

Susanne grew up in two different places, Herøy and , and she travelled all her life long

2 Dingstad, “Mytene etableres”, in Den Biografiske Ibsen, 79-99.

1 on the tracks of her husband Henrik Ibsen, or together with him. As an adult she experienced abroad various types of society, by Ibsen's side or with other cultured Scandinavians that she frequented regularly. In this extraordinary context frequented by fellow countrymen and women in the middle of different cultures, Suzannah spent some time by herself developing her independence of thought, expanded her literary knowledge on Ibsen's side and enhanced her literary activity, that she had already expressed in rudimentary forms when she was a child in Bergen, following her stepmother's model. In fact, Magdalene Thoresen was the first unique woman that Susanne ever met: she loved literature and dedicated herself into reading, into teaching to her many daughters, transmitting her p