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{ 52 } \ A Historiography of Informed Imagination A (Hi)Story Drawn from the Correspondence of Annie Russell and Faith Baldwin —JOSEPH BROMFIELD AND JENNIFER JONES CAVENAUGH The problem with historical narrative is that while it proceeds from empirically validated facts or events, it necessarily requires imaginative steps to place them in a coherent story. Therefore a fictional element enters into all historical discourse. GEORGE G. IGGERS, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge This essay is an experiment in theatre historiography. We have been inspired in part by the methods of creative nonfiction, and more deeply by the writings of historians Hayden White and Peter Burke, to explore the use of the imagination in the writing of theatre history. Our subject is the actress Annie Russell, Shaw’s original Major Barbara and one of Charles Frohman’s early stars. Although the theatre at our college was built for Miss Russell, few of our colleagues knew much about her career, and so we began to explore her history as part of a faculty-student summer research project. In the college archives, in a folder in a basement file, we stumbled upon a small note written by Miss Russell’s greatnephew years after her death.“I fear that Annie’s personal life is hard to get at,” he wrote. “Some kind of Victorian dark cloud was over her reputation. I can only speculate that she was bisexual or that she contracted a social disease from { 53 } A HISTORIOGR APHY OF INFORMED IMAGINATION her first husband. But mine is an uninformed guess.”1 A clear picture of Annie was indeed “hard to get at,” and as our research progressed we encountered numerous mysteries in our secretive subject’s story: missing years spent recuperating from an unnamed but grave illness in Europe; a first husband whose name is violently scratched out of letters; cryptic references to constant pain, both physical and psychic; and diary entries that fixate on the women in her life. A hint here and there, a tantalizing suggestion, but like so many historical subjects , a sense of the real woman was ultimately elusive. In Annie Russell’s papers at the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division we found correspondence with nearly every major player in turn-of-the-century British and American theatre, including Maude Adams, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Rachel Crothers, Clyde Fitch, and Edith and Israel Zangwill, to name just a few. In her papers we were surprised to find that the largest set of letters came from a woman neither of us had ever heard of: Faith Baldwin. Faith and Annie’s correspondence spanned thirty years and filled nearly a quarter of the archive. Who was this woman? A friend? A confidante ? A lover? Another mystery. We soon discovered that Faith Baldwin was a prolific writer of romance novels: she published more than eighty-five books between 1921 and 1977, sold more than ten million copies, and was “one of the handful of . . . novelists to complete a five-foot shelf.”2 Furthermore, Faith first met Annie Russell backstage at the Astor Theater in 1906 when she was a precocious thirteen-year-old girl and Annie was a middle-aged actress at the height of career. After reading more than three hundred letters written between 1906 and 1936, we realized that Faith and Annie’s correspondence could help us to fill in some, but not all, of the gaps in Annie’s story. This brings us back to the historian’s imagination. Most historians would agree that a vivid imagination is an important component of historical investigation. “To be able imaginatively to enter history is one of the great gifts of being human,” writes historian and theologian F. Thomas Trotter; however, it is a gift looked upon with some suspicion in many scholarly venues.3 In the theatre we are creative and imaginative by choice, yet in our historical scholarship we often strive to distance ourselves from our inventive abilities for fear of sacrificing scholarly rigor. Trotter describes how the imagination, once considered indispensable to the historian, has gradually lost credibility as an investigative tool. “In the Middle Ages, the word imagination...

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