The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry ed. by Katherine Cockin (review)

For all the spiritedness and vivid powers of expression that never altogether deserted Ellen Terry, the fifth volume of her letters, in Katherine Cockin’s edition, makes for melancholy reading. “Oh, Mamie”, she writes to Mamie Metcalf on 12 February 1905, “it is a big world & it all turns about so quick – so quick! & the days are not half long enough it seems to me, or I love too many people, – I never seem to do anything I want to! – only to begin all round!” (1397 – references are to the letters as numbered by the editor). Beset by illness and money worries, responding to the demands of her children and trying to find happiness in the diminishing opportunities for work in the theatre, she appears in James Barrie’s Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, as Hermione in Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and in 1907-08 undertakes arduous tours in England and America as Cicely Waynflete in Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. On 12 June 1906 her Jubilee is celebrated at Drury Lane and in November 1909 she appears at the Scala Theatre as Nance Oldfield in Cicely Hamilton’s Pageant of Famous Women. There are a handful of appearances in short-lived (mainly, one-off) productions, but it is in the lectures on Shakespeare’s heroines, the first delivered in Boston, Massachusetts in 1910, that she finds her most effective and satisfying role. Nevertheless, in 1913 she writes to Shaw pleading for a new part from him: “I want to up & do something good = Tell me if there’s anything in sight = I’ve had 2 years of horrible idleness – thinking of nothing but my Self! – I’d like to go back to Theatre work as Somebody else!” (1708). Terry is fully occupied in “thinking of” other people outside the theatre, as the accounts of her life with her daughter Edy Craig and Edy’s partner, Christopher St John, reflect. Although letters to Edward Gordon Craig, quoted by Michael Holroyd in A Strange Eventful History (2008), are absent from this edition, there is evidence here of Terry continuing to cope with his waywardness and the consequences of his separation and divorce. In 1912 Craig is in Russia, working with Stanislavsksi on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She had sent her son a letter before he left, and reports that “whenever he wants to explode, he takes it out of his pocket – reads it – & the fit passes leaving him calm”. She adds: “he is such a fool to himself” (1654). But it is not so much having others in mind as the opportunity to think from within a character on stage that she really longs for. When she is performing, the old playfulness returns: the production of The Winter’s Tale brings her little satisfaction, but on at least one occasion as Hermione’s statue she is unable to stop herself from laughing at the over-acting of her Leontes and Paulina: “oh, Graham, I was rather glad”, she writes to W. Graham Robertson, “for I’ve not been able to laugh at all lately (and that’s downright wicked) but I’m so afraid I may do it again if they will shout!” (1459).

Happiness seems to come with marriage to the actor James Carew, almost thirty years her junior, in Pittsburgh on 22 June 1908 during the tour of Captain Brassbound: “I couldn’t be alone any longer[.] Then, a Miracle! Jim loved me–!” But, as she tells Robertson in the same letter (undated, but written after their return from the tour), Edy has taken against the new man in her life: “We are terrible happy (just a cloud as big as a childs [sic] fist because of Edy - & because for the moment he has to be away)” (1512). After a while, though, the relationship sours. Other friends and associates withhold their approval of the match, and Carew has little sense...