48 Ellen Key gave her three books of Ibsen : The Comedy of Love, Brand, and Peer Gynt. The choice of this gift is especially characteristic of both giver and receiver. Although Ibsen, in 1868, was already known as a great writer, he was not generally read in Sweden. But Sophie Key had not allowed the many duties of a large household in the country to deaden her intelligence, or to stifle her broad interests in literature and life. With keen insight into her daughter's development, she now intro- duced her to Ibsen. What effect his works had on Ellen, particularly The Comedy of Love, she has herself related in her Tankehilder {Thought Images). Though ill at the time, she unconsciously learned almost the whole play by heart. Her fevered imagination was filled with its characters, and her recovery was retarded because the brain had no respite from the sting of the sharp retorts. She says : " Ib- sen 's deepest pathos met me on a larger scale in Brand and Peer Gynt, but ... my innermost instincts had prepared a perfect concurrence with his high idealism in The Comedy of Love.'' We must hold fast the picture of Ellen Key at eighteen, overwhelmed with grief at the disclosure of society's half-heartedness, at the insincerity of all the world, in the presence