Nora's Return.
Cheney, Ednah D[ow]. Nora’s Return A Sequel to The Doll’s House of Henry Ibsen. Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1890.
12mo.; internally fresh and clean; embossed tan wrappers with yapped edges; horizontal decorative gilt band at front cover; title and author printed in black and light red; edges chipped; discreet repair to wrapper along upper hinge. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition. Ednah Dow Cheney (1824-1904), writer and reformer, grew up in a household that believed in the antislavery cause and women’s rights, but she attributed her intellectual awakening to the ferment created by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and other Transcendalists during the 1840s. Foremost, in Miss Cheney’s view, was Margaret Fuller whose “conversations” she attended; she later remarked: “I absorbed her life and thoughts, and to this day I am astonished to find how large a part of 'what I am when I am most myself' I have derived from her.” Like many other Boston reformers, Cheney was deeply involved in the abolitionist movement, yet her first reform effort was the establishment (with others) of a school of design for women in 1851. With the end of the Civil War, women’s rights became her abiding, if not sole, preoccupation. She was a founder and financial backer of the New England Women’s Club in 1868, worked to gain women access to the Boston School Committee (1863) and the right of women to vote in the election of school board members (1879). With Abby May she organized the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association and served as president from 1888-1901. A key member of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (vice president, 1870-1892) and the New England Woman Suffrage Association (executive committee member), she wrote many of the leaflets distributed during the fight for municipal suffrage; Alice Stone Blackwell described them as the best written on the subject (NAW).
The appearance of Ibsen’s A Doll House in 1878 almost immediately set off a firestorm of controversy. Suffragists and women’s rights activists saw the play as a “ringing battle-cry of freedom for women to which no true American can fail to respond” (Franklin). The play almost immediately inspired sequels. Cheney acknowledges that a sequel published by novelist Walter Besant spurred her to write her own version of Nora’s later life. Cheney wants her readers to appreciate “...the need of fuller recognition of [woman’s] individuality, and her right to lead a life of genuine activity and development.” She casts Nora’s Return into alternating diary entries by Nora and her estranged husband Helmar. Nora’s quandary is how she will live the rest of her life now that “Trust, love, joy, motherhood, sacrifice, wifehood” are all gone. A series of events persuade her to pursue a career as a nurse. (Cheney intended Nora’s Return, in part, as a tribute to the doctors and nurses of the New England Hospital for Women and Children founded by her friend and colleague Dr. Marie Zakrewska; Cheney served as its president from 1887-1902.) Like Margaret Fuller, Cheney envisions women having a role beyond that of mother and wife, a role in which as professionals they are at once independent and yet deeply engaged.
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