Miss Julie

Miss Julie is a naturalistic drama by the Swedish writer August Strindberg, written in 1888 under the Swedish title Fröken Julie and first performed on 14 March 1889. Set over the course of a single Midsummer's Eve and the following morning at a Swedish count's estate, the play centers on the aristocratic Miss Julie's attraction to Jean, her father's well-traveled valet, while Jean's fiancee Christine, the household cook, works nearby, with most of the action confined to the manor's kitchen. Strindberg described his characters as modern figures living in an age of transition, more vacillating and disintegrating than their predecessors, and the play stages the clash between aristocratic decline and working-class ambition through a lens shaped by Darwinian evolutionary thinking, making it one of the foundational texts of theatrical naturalism.