In 1891, Henrik Ibsen returned home to his native Norway following a long voluntary exile. He was hailed as a super star by his fellow Norwegians and admirers from all over the (Western) world. The young Irish student James Joyce wrote him a fan letter, and the young painter Edvard Munch portrayed him sitting in his own chair at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. Though Ibsen often reacted somewhat grumpily when people tried to approach him, he had yearned for admiration and acknowledgement before he left Norway in 1864.

The English poet, writer, translator and critic Edmund Gosse characterized Ibsen in a biographical study, issued a year after Ibsen's death, with these lines: ‘During the latest years of his life, which were spent as a wealthy and prosperous citizen of Christiania, the figure of Ibsen took forms of legendary celebrity which were equalled [sic.] by no other living man of letters, not even by Tolstoi, and which had scarcely been surpassed, among the dead, by Victor Hugo’.

Henrik Ibsen (1907) was published simultaneously in New York and London and subsequently reprinted four times in ten years, illustrating that even at the very beginning of the twentieth century Ibsen's celebrity status was not an exclusively national or even Scandinavian phenomenon. One might of course argue that Gosse's description was perhaps rather over-embellished. Gosse was indeed one of Ibsen's main advocates in Britain and had something of ‘a genius for inaccuracy’, as his friend Henry James put it. Yet, as Narve Fulsas has pointed out, Ibsen was far more successful at the end of the nineteenth century than were his German and Russian contemporaries, and did very well in comparison with bestselling authors like Emile Zola and Robert Louis Stevenson. If one takes into account the fact that Ibsen's market was much smaller than Zola's or Stevenson’s, Ibsen's plays published in the latter half of his career sold extremely well, so that in fact Gosse's characterization seems accurate enough.

However, sales figures alone – although they can be seen as the outward sign of recognition, power and status – do not fully explain Henrik Ibsen’s celebrity.