Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence (review)

From Nina Auerbach’s Ellen Terry: Player In Her Time (1987) to Michael Holroyd’s A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and their Remarkable Families (2008), there is a wealth of modern biographical writing on the leading lady of the Lyceum stage. Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence is a collection that emerged from the 2009 Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Conference at the University of Hull, and its inclusion of brief essays by both Auerbach and Holroyd highlights the ways in which it builds on and complements earlier biographical works. Its editor, Katharine Cockin, is a steward of Terry’s legacy, as she is editing an eight-volume edition of the actress’s letters and is responsible for making the archives of Terry and her feminist daughter more accessible to scholars through the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database (http://www.ellenterryarchive.hull.ac.uk/).

Terry was the descendent of a theatrical family, wife of artist George Frederic Watts, lover of architect Edward Godwin, leading lady to Henry Irving, Shakespearean interpreter in both stage productions and lectures, and mother of the theater innovators Edith and Edward Gordon Craig. The essays in this collection provide a sense of the rich, contradictory life of a woman who exemplifies the successful Victorian actress. The book explores Terry’s various roles as fallen woman, muse, savvy image constructor, networker, mother, theater producer, power broker, and patron. Yet even as the emphasis is on Terry and her far-reaching effects on others, Richard Foulkes’s essay, “Lewis Carroll, Ellen Terry and the Stage Career of Menella ‘Minna’ Quin: ‘A Very Kind and Christian Deed,’” places her celebrity in stark contrast with the career of an unknown Victorian actress. Using the exceptional Terry as a vehicle for understanding the life of Victorian actresses more generally he concludes that the fact that in 1894 the stage was considered a desirable career for Menella Quin provides “a measure of the advances in attitudes towards the theatre” (106). In other essays as well, the ostensible subject of this book is interestingly decentered. As a result, it will interest both Terry aficionados and readers working in the fields of Victorian and modern theater and art.

Several of these essays use Terry to provide new insights into the work or lives of others. Even as they provide testimony to Terry’s importance as a cultural influence, essays by J. Michael Walton, Charlotte Purkis, Roberta Gandolfi, Catherine Wynne, and Jenny Bloodworth, for example, are much more concerned with Godwin, Edward and Edith Craig, Velona Pilcher, Bram Stoker, and Clotilde Graves than with Terry. The essays remain grounded in actual, documented interactions between Terry and these individuals without moving centrifugally outward to her more general influence as a figure in Victorian culture. The methodology throughout is rigorously historical, and these essays, like others in the collection, are admirably researched, drawing heavily on published and unpublished memoirs, journals, and letters. Many of the essays, such as Veronica Franklin Gould’s on the ways in which Terry and Watts shaped each other’s lives and art, will undoubtedly become required reading for scholars.

Decentered as she is, Terry nevertheless serves as the central figure in several case studies in the transition from Victorian to modern theater. Katherine E. Kelly’s “The After Voice of Ellen Terry,” for example, argues that when lecturing on Shakespeare Terry was “an advocate not only for the Shakespeare heroine as mindful and gifted but also for the women’s movement.” Even as Kelly places Terry in a direct—albeit noncommittal—relationship with the twentieth-century suffragettes, claiming that Terry “found herself in a gap between Victorian and modern, unwilling or unable to belong fully to one period or the other” (66), she points out an important, nuanced distinction: “Terry revealed while the suffragists declared their kinship with Shakespeare. But Terry’s influence as both celebrity Shakespeare actress and seasoned interpreter gave suffrage performers a foundation from which to...