Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence ed. by Katharine Cockin, and: Performing Herself: Autobiography and Fanny Kelly's Dramatic Recollections by Gilli Bush-Bailey (review)

These studies are grounded in their intention to question and re-map our understandings of the theatre industry of the long nineteenth century. Questions about self-representation, public practices and autobiography reverberate through both. Katharine Cockin's edited collection Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence addresses the significance and impact of social and professional networks on the theatre industry's hierarchy, image and repertoire. Gilli Bush-Bailey's Performing Herself: Autobiography and Fanny Kelly's Dramatic Recollections challenges us to rethink how we do theatre history, even if doing so leads us down routes that are neither "easy" nor "unproblematic" (5). Predicating historical analysis on personality will always prompt a particular set of challenges. When do analysis and evidence veer too far into the realms of speculation and assumption? This is the terrain tackled by Cockin. Her introduction firmly locates the actress in the cult of personality that framed the theatrical and social milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asking "questions about [her] spheres of influence, placing her at the centre of what became an influential circle or network" (3). The collection has an ambitious remit, embracing numerous methodological, as well as disciplinary, approaches and the collection will be of interest to scholars across theatrical, cultural, social and aesthetic histories.

Individual contributions to Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence prove valuable and stimulating interventions into the histories of the late-Victorian and Edwardian stage. Whilst Jenny Bloodworth's essay on Terry's role as Countess Glicka in Clotilde Graves's The Mistress of the Robes (1902) occasionally neglects to account for the influence and persistent presence of established stage conventions and public reception of them, it reveals a focused analysis of a facet of Terry's character that extends our understanding of her as a professional actress and celebrity performer. Richard Foulkes's essay on Terry's relationship with Lewis Carroll and the resulting friendship network that facilitated the stage career of Menella "Minna" Quinn is a skilful, comprehensive and enlightening study of the dynamics of the theatre industry in this period and the interlocking networks of friendship, business, professional training, pleasure and leisure. There is, however, a palpable lack of cohesion to the collection as a whole. The essays vary in their quality, their stages of critical and analytical development and their intended audiences. Some heavily contextual pieces are directed at those with little prior knowledge of the area. Others anticipate readers well-grounded in this period of theatrical history and offer little in the way of contextual information. The collection's narrative does not consistently meet the editorial vision laid out in the introduction (and cited above) and its intended readership is unclear. Instead, the collection reads as a series of journal articles (many interesting and valuable) or a thematically-connected published conference proceedings, rather than a sustained, cohesive intervention. Gilli Bush-Bailey's Performing Herself: Autobiography and Fanny Kelly's Dramatic Recollections offers a new and distinctive approach to the discipline of theatre history. Less expansive in its remit than Cockin's book, the study draws together critical approaches from historiography, studies of autobiography and gender studies to offer a contextual introduction and "performance biography" of the actress, writer and theatre manager Fanny Kelly. These proceed an edited script for Kelly's (never-before published) one-woman show, Dramatic Recollections. This rigorous study, grounded in extensive archival research, contributes to the ongoing renegotiations of melodrama as "an innovative and serious business in the nineteenth century" (24), the theatre industry as a professional world for significantly more women than have been previously thought and, by extension, the "entrenched inequalities of our contemporary entertainment industry" (3). Its theoretical reflections will be of interest to scholars from diverse backgrounds and there is a good...