Ellen Terry,the ghost-writer and the laughing statue: the Victorian actress,letters and life-writing

Unpublished letter from Ellen Terry to Bertha Bramley, 23 February 1896; ET 2.020, Ellen Terry Memorial Museum (hereafter ETMM).

Unpublished letter from Ellen Terry to Bertha Bramley, nd; ET 2.044 ETMM.

Roger Manvell , Ellen Terry (London: Heinemann, 1968), 227.

Gail Marshall , Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 178.

Katharine Cockin , Edith Craig (1869-1947). Dramatic Lives ( London: Cassell 1998).

Ibid., 6.

Unpublished letter from Ellen Terry to Bertha Bramley 1885; ET 2019 ETMM.

Elizabeth Goldsmith , 'Introduction', in Elizobeth Goldsmith (ed.), Writing the Female Voice Essays in Epistolary Literatures (London: Pinter, 1989 ), vii.

'Craig in book attacks Bernard Shaw again: Ellen Terry's son repeats that author "betrayed" actress by publishing letters', New York Times, 10 March 1932; EC G1952 ETMM.

See, for instance, Tracy Davis , Actresses as Working Women, their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge,1991); and Tracy Davis and Ellen Donkin (eds), Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1999 ).

Jacky Bratton , 'Jane Scott the writer-manager', in Davis and Donkin , op. cit, 77.

Marshall , op. cit., 6.

Letter from Ellen Terry to Graham Robertson, 6 September 1906 quoted in Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in her Time ( London: Phoenix House, 1987), 283.

See collection in the library of Ellen Terry, ETMM.

Ellen Terry , The Story of my Life (London: Hutchinson , 1908), 82. Terry played Philippa Chester in The Wandering Heir. Reade also wrote a play about Peg Woffington, Masks and Faces (1852). Music to accompany Nance Oldfield is extant; Q31 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Ellen Terry to Charles Reade, ET 2.229a; ETMM.

Marshall , op. cit., 180.

Ibid., 181.

See Elizabeth Howe , The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For analysis of Christopher St John's play, The First Actress and Cicely Hamilton's A Pageant of Great Women and 'Anti-suffrage Waxworks', see Katharine Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players 1911-25 (London: Palgrave, 2001), Ch. 4; and Katharine Cockin , 'The history of women in theatre', in Lizbeth Goodman with Jane De Gay (eds), The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (London: Routledge, 1998), 19-24.

For The First Actress, see also Lesley Ferris , 'The female self and performance: the case of the first actress', in Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler (eds), Theatre and Feminist Aesthetic (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses), 242-57; and Christine Dymkowski , 'Entertaining ideas: Edy Craig and the pioneer players', in Viv Gardner and Susan Ruthertord (eds), The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850-1914 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf , 1992). Oldfield was presented as moving in a world of 'happy-go-lucky Bohemians' and New Women: '[...] the world has changed very little, for even then we hear of dashing specimens of the New Woman, in the persons of ladies who affected men's hats, feathers, coats, and perriwigs [sic], to such an extent that our dear friend Addison will gently rebuke them during the reign of the Spectator; Edward Robins, The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield (London: William Heinemann, 1898), 12.

Christopher St John , The First Actress, prompt copy; ETMM. See also Cockin (2001), op. cit. (Note 20), 85-6. Terry acted as Nell Gwyn in Sweet Nell of Old Drury.

Cicely Hamilton , A Pageant of Great Women ( London: Marian Lawson, 1948), 15.

Cockin ( 1998), op. cit (Note 5), 94-107; and Cockin (2001), op. cit. (Note 20), 82-5. Similarly, and presumably without knowledge of A Pageant of Great Women, Caryl Churchill in Top Girls (1982) juxtaposed the exceptional and the undistinguished from present and past, in a productive way.

Suffragette, 13 March 1914.

George Orwell's survey of McGill's visual jokes includes a misogynistic joke dependent on the ossification of the other: 'Countless postcards show draggled hags of the stage charwoman type exchanging "unladylike" abuse. Typical repartee: "I wish you were a statue and I was a pigeon!"'; George Orwell, 'The art of Donald McGill', Horizon, 4 (21), September 1941 , 156. Tickner quotes Orwell in this essay as one who 'thought comic postcards "something as traditional as Greek tragedy"'; Lisa Tickner , The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14 (London : Chatto & Windus, 1987), 163.

However, it was also possible for a performance of W.S. Gilbert's , Pygmalion and Galaten to be staged without irony and with a cast of beautiful aristocrats. Ellen Terry and Edith Craig produced it at the King's Hall, Covent Garden , London, on 23 May 1913 in aid of the Sunshine Convalscent Home & Fitzroy Club for Working Boys; EC D293, EC G1645, EC G1646 ETMM.

Time & Tide, 26 June 1932; EC G1729; ETMM.

Edith Craig and Christopher St John (eds), Ellen Terry's Memoirs (London: Gollancz, 1933 ), vi.

'Daughter buys Ellen Terry relics: great actress wrote letters on scraps of paper', Glasgow Bulletin, 6 September 1938; EC G1843 ETMM. 'Daughter bid most for faded letters', Daily Herald, 6 September 1938; EC G1860 ETMM.

'Ellen Terry's letters', Manchester Guardian, 6 September 1938; EC G1874 ETMM.

Craig and St John, op. cit., 323; unpublished letter from Lord Dunsany to Edith Craig, 1 October 1928; EC 3.204 ETMM.

Marshall, op. cit. (Note 4), 179.

Manvell, op. cit. (Note 3), 307; Auerbach, op. cit. (Note 13), 27.

Terry, op. cit. (Note 15), xi.

Craig and St John, op. cit., viii.

St John's deal amounted to $500 per article to be divided equally between St John and Terry; letter from Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 2 June 1910; ET 1.422 ETMM. Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 26 June 1910; ET 1.427 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 26 June 1910; ET 1.427 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 15 June 1910; ET 1.425 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 14 June 1910; ET 1.423 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 16 June 1910; ET 1.426 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 26 June 1910; ET 1.427 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Christopher St John to Ellen Terry, 1 July 1910; ET 1.428 ETMM.

Unpublished letter from Ellen Terry to Edith Craig, 21 August 1912; ET 2.287 ETMM.

K. Cockin , 'Ellen Terry and the art of letters: the actor as writer in the British Women's Suffrage Movement', paper given at The Gender, The Letter and Politics Conference, University of Sheffield, January 2001.

Craig and St John, op. cit. (Note 29), 74.

Unpublished letter from Ellen Terry to Bertha Bramley, 8 June [no year]; ET 2.055 ETMM.