The Victorian Actress in the Novel and On the Stage by Renata Kobetts Miller (review)

The intersection of theater and the novel has been a busy one in recent years, and it has seen a fresh flow of traffic from theatrical thoroughfares. Studies like Michael Meeuwis's Everyone's Theatre: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), Carolyn Williams's "Melodrama and the Realist Novel" (2018), and Victoria Wiet's "The Actress in Nature: Environments of Artistic Development in Victorian Fiction and Memoir" (2018) have made a compelling case for taking popular theater seriously as a shaping force in the development of the more thoroughly studied Victorian novel, as well as in the formation of Victorian aesthetics, ideology, and cultural practice more broadly.

Within this field, Renata Kobetts Miller's The Victorian Actress in the Novel and On the Stage focuses particular attention on the figure of the performing woman, which she argues became a site of generic competition between theater and the novel. By tracking shifts in the ways authors of both drama and fiction represent actresses, Miller constructs a narrative of how these two cultural forms influenced each other through the second half of the nineteenth century. This period is often associated with the novel's ascent to middle-class respectability, and The Victorian Actress traces how novelists used fictional women performers to test their form's relative ability to represent subjectivity and to address a respectable audience. But Miller also suggests that the actress's tendency to raise questions about authenticity, domesticity, and publicity allowed the theater to push back—and that by staking its own claim to aesthetic realism, Victorian drama produced greater changes in the novel than have previously been remarked.

In making this case, Miller draws from a varied archive of sources, including canonical novels from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–8) to Henry James's The Tragic Muse (1889–90); popular plays like Dion Boucicault's Peg Woffington (1845) and T. W. Robertson's Caste (1867); dramatic criticism by figures like George Henry Lewes and William Archer; and archival materials related to suffrage organizations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While each chapter includes some extended case studies, the chapters also follow the actress across new constellations of texts—making connections between works like Diderot's dramatic essay The Paradox of Acting (published in 1830), Edward Lancaster's theatrical interlude "The Manager's Daughter" (produced at the Haymarket in 1837), and Charles Reade's novel Peg Woffington (1853). In doing so, Miller produces a historical narrative whose turning points are different than those typically found in histories of either the novel or the theater when those genres are considered separately.

Chapter 1 connects Victorian theories of mimicry with Victorian anxieties about class mutability to argue that in the 1840s and 50s, representations of the actress grounded her authenticity in her class identity in order to limit her ability to disrupt social hierarchies. Chapter 2 tracks how this strategy of containment shifted in the 1860s, as plays and novels used the actress's ability to mimic social qualities to destabilize the structures that held class in place. Chapter 3 examines the role of performing women in George Eliot's work, and Miller lingers with a particularly under-read example in the closet drama Armgart (1871). In contrast to visions of the woman artist as a figure who transcends or eschews the public, Eliot's Armgart uses her talents to embrace a broader audience and, through that audience, to influence the public sphere. By concentrating on her representation of exceptional women, Miller suggests that Eliot's actresses laid the groundwork for both the anti-theatrical backlash against courting popular readership in George Moore's A Mummer's Wife (1885)—which stands at the center of chapter 4—and eventually for the Actresses' Franchise League's use of suffrage drama to challenge the ideology of separate spheres—which forms the...