Miss Julie

Expressionism and Impressionism were its immediate followers, and Freudianism, Existentialism, Absurdism and a dozen other isms lay not far down the same road. In their light, and despite the existence of a couple of dozen masterpieces (among them Miss Julie), it seems clear that Naturalistic ideas worked best when taken up and used for their own purposes and in their own ways by writers of other kinds, such as Ibsen (and in fiction, later, Proust and the young James Joyce).

The Father had been respectfully received, but he himself felt that in it he had had to make too many concessions to conventional form and style – in a word, that it was too ‘Ibsenish’