Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Beautiful, charming, witty and vivacious, but the possessor of ``eerily large, powerful hands she hid throughout her life,'' Dame Ellen Terry (18471928) was one of the most popular actresses of the late 19th century. Incorporating hitherto unpublished letters, this complex study by a University of Pennsylvania professor (Communities of Women, etc.) covers the long life and exemplary career of a remarkable woman. Briefly married three times, mother of two illegitimate children (one of whom, Edward Gordon Craig, became a noted director-designer-theorist), Terry worked for a quarter-century with actor-director Henry Irving, carried on a brilliant correspondence with George Bernard Shaw (who wrote several parts for her) and, late in life, growing blind, became a world-traveling lecturer-recitalist. She always was loved and admired more for her warm personality than for her skill as an actress. Auerbach's stilted but exhaustive biography supersedes the 1968 book by Roger Manvell. Photos not seen by PW. (June 29)

Library Journal

Auerbach, author of several books of literary criticism, here explores the life of Victorian actress Terry. Her thesis is that Terry's offstage life encompassed nearly every role available to Victorian womenchild, child bride, fallen woman, mother, star, madwoman, croneand she therefore became ``Everywoman'' to the Victorians. With multitudes of literary comparisons, this is less a biography than a literary critique of Terry's life, as created by herself and re-created by the men in her lifepre-Raphaelite painter G.F. Watts, designer Edward Godwin, actor Henry Irving, author G.B. Shaw, her son, Gordon Craigand finally, by her feminist and lesbian daughter, Edith Craig. Almost Victorian in style, this is an erudite analysis of women's roles in the Victorian era. Marcia L. Perry, Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass.