The text – The one-act play Miss Julie was written at Holte, close to Copenhagen, in the period 10 July–10 August 1888. The preface was written soon after the play had been completed. Concerning the exact time of composition there are three statements by Strindberg himself. In a letter to Karl Otto Bonnier on 10 August 1888, he writes that he has worked on the play for “one month”. In a letter to his brother Johan Oscar on 19 November 1888, it says, apparently with regard to Miss Julie and Creditors: “I wrote my two tragedies in fourteen days each and here among theatre and literature people they are regarded as masterpieces.” In an undated letter from July or August 1894, to Leopold Littmansson, it again says: “I have written my most powerful pieces, Miss Julie and Creditors, in 30 days, during a forced celibacy.” In other words, according to the letter to his brother, Strindberg seems to have begun writing the play around 25 July, according to the letters to Bonnier and Littmansson already on 10 July.

The play was published together with the preface in a partly distorted way in the week of 23–29 November 1888. The distortion was caused by the fact that the publisher, Joseph Seligmann, had asked for certain changes in the manuscript. Constantly in need of money in this period, Strindberg was forced to accept. When John Landquist published the play in 1914 in vol. 23 of Strindberg's Collected Writings, he did not have access to the original manuscript. He therefore could not tell which changes had been made by Strindberg and which by Seligmann. Not until the manuscript was made accessible to scholars in 1936 was it possible to restore Strindberg's original version to some extent.

A great step forward was taken by Harry Bergholz when in 1954, he tried to make sense of the changes and reconstruct the authentic text. Bergholz’ analysis formed the basis for Göran Lindström's (Strindberg 1963) and Carl Reinhold Smedmark's (Strindberg 1964) slightly different editions. Not until Gunnar Ollén's edition (Strindberg 1984) did we get a version which presumably reproduces Strindberg's text as intended for the printer as closely as possible.