Unlisted and probably the only existing presentation copy from Henrik Ibsen to Laura Kieler (b. Petersen).

Writer and women's rights activist Laura Kieler is today best known as an (involuntary) source of inspiration for Ibsen's Nora and “lark” in his scandalous success “A Doll's House” – a play that has had an enormous influence on modern theatre. Laura Kieler thereby played a crucial role in establishing Ibsen's widespread fame as the model for one of the great figures in theatre history: Nora – the woman who walked out the door. Without Laura and her own tragic marriage, the drama would never have been made.

The young 20-year-old budding writer Laura met Ibsen for the first time when she wrote her own ambitious play “Brand’s Daughters” in response to Ibsen's “Brand”. The two met in Copenhagen in 1870, and here Ibsen invited her to Dresden, where he lived. The visit was so successful and joyful that Ibsen at the end of her stay in the summer of 1871 called Laura “our little lark”.

In 1873, Laura married the Danish assistant professor Victor Kieler, who a few years later due to illness was ordered to take a trip to the South of Europe to improve his health. Money was tight, so Laura secretly borrowed funds from a Norwegian bank, and for the means that Kieler thought his wife earned from her “writing” they travelled South, where he was eventually cured of his illness. In Munich they visited Ibsen in the autumn of 1876. Upon her return she could not repay the loan. Ibsen, who had been privy to the miserable situation, wrote in a letter that he declined to help her. The bank's public claim on the unpaid loan turned the situation into a disaster. The husband demanded a divorce, and Laura was admitted to a mental hospital and deprived of seeing her children for two years.

In December 1879, Ibsen's “A Doll's House” had its premiere. In the wake of the play's triumph, the gossip spread along the grapevine about the incident that had inspired the plot, and Laura Kieler felt compromised and exposed in public. In 1891, she visited Ibsen one last time and admonished him for his misuse of her story in “A Doll's House”. It is believed that this critique was an important source of inspiration for Ibsen’s final play “When We Dead Awaken” from 1899.

Laura Kieler wrote approx. 30 literary works, and in addition she was an avid debater in the journals of women's organizations. The Norwegian writer and women's rights activist Camilla Collet summarized the whole misery like this: “Ibsen took the Nora of reality hostage in his chariot of ambition and world fame.”