There are at least five good reasons that serious readers of J. K. Rowling should read Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, read it closely, listen to it in performance, and take notes. By making it the source of every chapter epigraph in ‘Robert Galbraith’s’ Lethal White, the centerpiece of the Cormoran Strike mysteries, she is signalling us that this play is something of a key or cipher for the right understanding of her current series.
Odds are that you are not familiar with this play or with Ibsen. That was certainly true in my case until Lethal White was published. I downloaded via Gutenberg.com and then bought a copy of the translation Rowling used; more importantly, I found a recording of a performance of the play my wife was able to put on my son’s ipod (here is another one that is free to download). I have been able to listen to it five times and that has made all the difference to me.
I write this ‘Five Reasons to Read Rosmersholm’ post in order to encourage you to do any one of the above. What follows won’t make any sense to you, though, if you have no idea of what the play is about. The wikipedia Rosmersholm page will help with that, if it, perhaps inevitably, fails to convey any of the drama of the successive revelations that take place act to act in the major players.
If you want to really ‘get’ Lethal White, you need to know Rosmersholm. I explain why after the jump!
Lethal White has been a focus at HogwartsProfessor since the publication of Career of Evil in 2015. This Pillar Post for ‘Strike4’ is a gathering and organizing of more than eighty of the more important articles that discuss Lethal White directly or indirectly. This list was most recently updated on 22 June 2019.
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