Edith Craig (1869-1947), illegitimate, lesbian, suffragette, was the most extraordinary contributor to British Theatre of her time. As an actor on stage and in silent movies, she was also a brilliant costume designer, costume maker, stage producer, director and fencing expert. As she worked and toured throughout the UK and USA with her mother, world famous actress Dame Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving, her memoirs throw light on that iconic theatrical partnership, illuminating in a most colourful way the magic that gripped audiences everywhere. Not only did she meet and work with other illustrious names of the day including Sarah Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry, George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson, J.M. Barrie, Thomas Beecham, Richard D’Oyly Carte, Queen Alexandra, King George V, but she also lived her personal life in a ménage à trois.Edy began dictating her memoirs soon after Ellen Terry died in 1928 and revised them after the Second World War, just before she died in 1947. Now the memoirs are ready for all to read, complete with a lavish colourful collection of 64 rare photos and illustrations.Edy was a Lady is a fabulous feast of recollections from one who for so long lived happily in the shadow of her mother, but is now in the spotlight in her own right.
In this essay collection, established experts and new researchers, reassess the performances and cultural significance of Ellen Terry, her daughter Edith Craig (1869–1947) and her son Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), as well as Bram Stoker, Lewis Carroll and some less familiar figures.
Very successful when first performed in London in 1908, Diana of Dobson’s introduces its audience to the overworked and underpaid female assistants at Dobson’s Drapery Emporium, whose only alternative to their dead-end jobs is the unlikely prospect of marriage. Although Cicely Hamilton calls the play “a romantic comedy,” like George Bernard Shaw she also criticizes a social structure in which so-called self-made men profit from the cheap labour of others, and men with good educations, but insufficient inherited money, look for wealthy wives rather than for work. This Broadview edition also includes excerpts from Hamilton’s autobiography Life Errant (1935) and Marriage as a Trade (1909), her witty polemic on “the woman question”; historical documents illustrating employment options for women and women’s work in the theatre; and reviews of the original production of the play.
This widely acclaimed book has been described by History Today as a 'landmark in the study of the women's movement'. It is the only comprehensive reference work to bring together in one volume the wealth of information available on the women's movement. Drawing on national and local archival sources, the book contains over 400 biographical entries and more than 800 entries on societies in England, Scotland and Wales. Easily accessible and rigorously cross-referenced, this invaluable resource covers not only the political developments of the campaign but provides insight into its cultural context, listing novels, plays and films.
Ellen Terry's correspondence was both exuberant and extensive. Her remaining letters provide a fascinating insight into the dynamics of the Victorian theatre, and the difficulties of life for a woman maintaining a successful public persona whilst raising two illegitimate children.
Henry Irving (1838-1905), the first actor to be knighted, dominated the theatre in Britain and beyond for over a quarter of a century. As an actor, he was strikingly different with his idiosyncratic pronunciation, his somewhat ungainly physique, and his brilliant psychological portrayals of virtue and villainy. As a director of spectacular, and commercially driven, entertainments, Irving anticipated Hollywood directors from D.W. Griffith to Stephen Spielberg. And as manager of the Lyceum Theatre, where audiences included the leading public figures of the day, he controlled every aspect of the performance. This collection of essays by leading theatre scholars explores each element of Irving's art: his acting, his contribution to the plays he commissioned, his flair for the stage picture, and his ear for incidental music. Like Wagner, Irving was a proponent of a holistic approach to the stage, that is, blending together acting, painting, music, and architecture to create harmonious, balanced, and artistic theatre. Irving emerges not only as the peer of such eminent contemporaries as Tennyson, Sullivan, Shaw, and Burne-Jones, but also as a powerful influence on the twentieth-century theatre.
“These essays exemplify all the virtues of interdisciplinarity in consideration of that most multidisciplined of writers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The contributors simultaneously clarify and complicate our understanding of some of the more vexed areas of Gilman's work by engaging saliently with her theories of ethnicity, class, prostitution, and the dynamics of gender; posing difficult questions to contemporary feminist scholars; and providing sensitive and insightful guidance to a well-chosen and wide range of texts.”—Janet Beer, author of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction
Lena Connell was one of a new breed of young professional women who took up photography at the turn of the 20th century. She ran her own studio in North London, only employed women, and made her mark on history by creating compellingly modern portraits of women in the British suffrage movement. The women that Connell captured on film are as class-inclusive a group as you could find: whether they were factory workers, schoolteachers, or aristocrats, they joined the cause to make a difference for future generations of women, if not for themselves. Connell's portraits created a new kind of visibility for these activists as hard-working, unrelenting women, whose spirits rose above injustice. This book examines Connell's artistic career within the Edwardian suffrage movement. It discusses her body of portraits within the British suffrage movement's propagandistic efforts and its goals of sophisticated, professional representations of its members. It includes all of her known portraits of suffragettes through 1914.