"Irreproachable Women and Patient Workers": The Memoirs of Victorian Leading Ladies

When Victoria ascended the throne, respectable society anathematized those men, women, and children for whom the theater was both a workplace and a way of life.¹ The middle classes viewed the stage, in critic Mary Jean Corbett's words, as "the last refuge of the disgraced younger son or the 'fallen woman,' a sort of domestic foreign legion" (118). Actress, manager, and memoirist Marie Bancroft (1839-1921) acknowledges that acting was a profession that respectable society preferred to keep at a distance. Describing her childhood in a roving theatrical family, she writes in 1888, "to be an actor meant exile from home, family, friends, and general respectability" (2). A woman who went on stage was still further ostracized by polite society; she was regarded as fallen or soon to be fallen. Bancroft's use of the past tense implies that she would like her readers to view themselves as having shed the anti-theatrical prejudice of the past, although her memoir, like that of other leading ladies, is an attempt to establish her claim to approbation in the mind of respectable society. In her study of Victorian and Edwardian autobiographies, Corbett argues persuasively that Bancroft, together with actresses Fanny Kemble and Madge Kendal, "do not challenge the middle-class ideal of womanhood, but seek to perform it, onstage and off" (107). I contend that Victorian actresses portray themselves as ordinary, respectable women, but at the same time they are also concerned with establishing an image of themselves as skilled professionals who by their own efforts have earned the right to public acclaim and financial success. In short, these texts aim to create an image of a new type of respectable woman, the working professional.

By the 1880s Victorian society was beginning to distinguish the actress from the fallen woman, in part because fictional actresses infiltrated the circulating libraries. Novelists created a new, appealing image of the actress, usually as an unworldly young woman forced by familial financial disaster to support an aged parent or handicapped sibling. After a brief spell on stage, during which she resisted all onslaughts upon her virtue, she would marry a convenient gentleman and retire to the suburbs to raise a family. Fiction featuring a virtuous actress was common in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Examples include Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half Sisters (1848), Annie Edward(e)s's The Morals of May Fair (1858) and Ought We to Visit Her? (1871), Florence Marryat's My Sister the Actress (1881) and Facing the Footlights (1883), Harriett Jay's Through the Stage Door (1883), William Black's In Silk Attire (1869), Bertha Buxton's Jennie of "The Prince's" (1876), S. R. Crockett's The Play-actress (1894), Mary Angela Dickens's Cross Currents (1892), Mary Ward's Miss Bretherton (1884), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Dead Sea Fruit (1868), "Too Bright to Last" (1871), and "Across the Footlights" (1884). This fiction redefined acting as a demanding and often quasi-religious vocation, not merely an income-producing job that catered to male sexual fantasies and audiences' desire for self-indulgent entertainment.

Nonfiction as well as fiction assisted in the slow movement of the actress toward the ranks of the socially acceptable. In 1859, "S," the author of an article in The English Woman's Review entitled "A Few Words about Actresses," begins by informing her readers that their preconceptions about an actress's life are not based upon fact: "as a gifted woman's devotion to art, or the honest and laborious means by which she earns her bread, the vocation of the actress is understood by few" (385). Like the novelists, "S" stresses vocation and presents a picture of actresses as an extremely hard-working secular sisterhood, the object of whose efforts is not personal gain but a sort of societal housecleaning, with art used as the cultural cleaning rag. She...