He himself, the rector of Holy Cross, was a
bookish, meditative man of no particular initiative, but he had married,
as his third wife, Anna Maria Kragh, a Dane by birth, and for a long
time, with the possible exception of Camilla Collett, Wergeland's
sister, the most active woman of letters in Norway. Mrs. Thoresen was
the step-mother of Susannah, the only child of her husband's second
marriage. Between Magdalene Thoresen and Ibsen a strong friendship had
sprung up, which lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen's
best letters are those written to his wife's step-mother. She worked
hard for him at the Bergen theatre, translating plays from the French,
and it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre that several of her
own pieces were produced. Her prose stories, in connection with which
her name lives in Norwegian literature, were not yet written; so long as
Ibsen was at her side, her ideas seem to have been concentrated on the
stage. Constant communication with this charming woman only nine years
his senior, and much his superior in conventional culture, must have
been a school of refinement to the crude and powerful young poet.
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