We cannot point to any individual model or models who "sat to" Ibsen
for the character of Hedda.(5) The late Grant Allen declared that
Hedda was "nothing more nor less than the girl we take down to dinner
in London nineteen times out of twenty"; in which case Ibsen must
have suffered from a superfluidity of models, rather than from any
difficulty in finding one. But the fact is that in this, as in all
other instances, the word "model" must be taken in a very different
sense from that in which it is commonly used in painting. Ibsen
undoubtedly used models for this trait and that, but never for a
whole figure. If his characters can be called portraits at all, they
are composite portraits. Even when it seems pretty clear that the
initial impulse towards the creation of a particular character came
from some individual, the original figure is entirely transmuted in
the process of harmonisation with the dramatic scheme. We need not,
therefore, look for a definite prototype of Hedda; but Dr. Brandes
shows that two of that lady's exploits were probably suggested by
the anecdotic history of the day.

Ibsen had no doubt heard how the wife of a well-known Norwegian
composer, in a fit of raging jealousy excited by her husband's
prolonged absence from home, burnt the manuscript of a symphony
which he had just finished. The circumstances under which Hedda
burns Lovborg's manuscript are, of course, entirely different and
infinitely more dramatic; but here we have merely another instance
of the dramatisation or "poetisation" of the raw material of life.
Again, a still more painful incident probably came to his knowledge
about the same time. A beautiful and very intellectual woman was
married to a well-known man who had been addicted to drink, but had
entirely conquered the vice. One day a mad whim seized her to put