HEDDA GABLER, hĕd'dȧ gä'blẽr. A play by Hendrik Ibsen (1809), and the name of its heroine, an eccentric woman who, disappointed in her marriage with a young savant, attempts to regain her influence over a former lover, Eilert, now under the good influence of a former school friend of Hedda. He loses the manuscript of a new work which is to make him famous, and Hedda's husband finds it, but she destroys the work. When Eilert, in despair, thinks of suicide, she gives him a pistol with which he ends his life in a low resort, and Hedda kills herself.