Marichen Altenburg

Her father was a shipowner, timber merchant and owned a liquor distillery at Lundetangen and a farm outside of town; her mother had been born in Upper Telemark to a family that belonged to the regional elite there, the "aristocracy of officials".

[4] On 1 December 1825, she married Knud Ibsen, who had established himself as an independent merchant in Skien earlier in that year.

For example, older Ibsen historiography has often claimed that her husband engaged in heavy speculations, and became an alcoholic tyrant who visited "his bitterness and resentment on his wife and children.

Earlier Ibsen scholarship has claimed that Marichen Altenburg was an avid painter and in love with the theatre, and "worried her upright parents by attending every performance of the travelling Danish troupes, and by continuing to play with her childhood dolls when she was grown.

[1] Marichen Altenburg was portrayed by Kjersti Holmen in the 2006 NRK mini series En udødelig mann (Indomitable one).