Women's Theatrical Memoirs
Series Editor: Jennie Batchelor
Volume Editors: Sue Mcpherson, Sharon M Setzer and Julia Swindells
Chawton House Library
Chawton House Library: Women's Memoirs
978 1 85196 861 9: 234x156mm: £425.00/$750.00
978 1 85196 875 6: 234x156mm: £425.00/$750.00
By the close of the eighteenth century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. The texts brought together in this ten-volume facsimile collection present the lives of some of the most celebrated actresses of their day. As well as offering fascinating accounts of the late eighteenth-century stage, these memoirs also provide revealing insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
- All texts are republished in full
- Selected for their rarity, the texts are drawn from Chawton House’s unparalleled collection
- Most of the texts included have never before been republished
- Each set in the series includes a substantial general introduction, headnotes, endnotes and a consolidated index in their final volume
- Each facsimile page is digitally cleaned and enhanced, significantly improving on the quality and legibility of the original
Sample pages
- Volume 1: Volume Introduction
- Volume 1: Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson (1801) (excerpt)
- Volume 1: Endnotes
Contents
Part I
Volume 1
Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson (1801)
In 1779, Robinson captured the heart of the young Prince of Wales as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale. Her account is one of the highlights of her Memoirs, written almost twenty years later, amid the furore that erupted over William Godwin’s publication of Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The unfavorable reception of Godwin’s intended tribute to Wollstonecraft provided Robinson with the impetus to rewrite the unsympathetic stories that followed her affair with the Prince of Wales.
Volumes 2 & 3
James Boaden, The Life of Mrs Jordan (1831)
Playwright and theatrical critic James Boaden’s Life of Mrs Jordan promised its readers ‘a more perfect picture’ of the actress and ‘a truer representation of her colourful "private life"’ than any previous biographer had attempted. Both an admiring account of Dorothy Jordan’s career on the stage and a sympathetic treatment of her life as mistress of Prince William Henry, Duke of Clarence (later William IV) and mother of his ten children, this remained the definitive biography of the actress for many years.
Volumes 4 & 5
Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs Siddons (1834)
Thomas Campbell’s biography offers an affectionate portrait of the most celebrated tragic actress of her generation. Based on correspondence, memoranda and personal recollections of the biographer’s long-standing friendship with Siddons, Campbell’s Life presents a compelling account of the actress’s meteoric rise to fame following her appearance as Isabella in Thomas Southerne’s Fatal Marriage at Drury Lane in 1782.
Part II
Volumes 6–8
Elizabeth Steele, The Memoirs of Mrs Sophia Baddeley (1787)
During her eventful life as an actress and courtesan, Sophia Baddeley experienced fame and fortune on the public stage, and suffered the effects of poverty, imprisonment, domestic violence, suicide, and drug addiction. Baddeley’s biographer, Elizabeth Steele, was a childhood friend, who had left her family to live with Baddeley in London’s fashionable West End. The Memoirs is an intimate account of their relationship, as Steele gallops her readers from the Opera House to Ranelagh Gardens, from Hyde Park to Paris, and depicts the women gossiping and dressmaking, surrounded by their beloved cats and canaries. This sentimental apologia attempts to recover Baddeley from popular portrayal as an ‘eminent instance of feminine terror’, as John Williams described her. However, it is also a satire exposing the hypocrisy of fashionable society, a social critique of sexual exploitation, and, perhaps above all, a commercial enterprise, as the argument over the Memoirs’ copyright suggests.
Volume 9
Leah Sumbel, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Sumbel, Part I (1811)
Leah Wells Sumbel, née Davies, better known as the popular stage performer Mary Wells, appears, over the course of her life, to have experienced every vicissitude known to woman; domestic violence as a child and later as a wife, apparently inappropriate incarceration for madness, imprisonment for debt, not to mention ill-health, death of a child, disinheritance for pursuing a stage career and exploitation of her labour, not only by successive theatre managers, but also by her second quasi-marital partner, Edward Topham, owner of the daily newspaper, ‘The World’ (for which Sumbel often acted as unpaid editor). Her three-volume memoir, establishing her sanity, also represents an attempt to rehabilitate her theatrical career and includes significant contemporary reviews of her performances at a range of theatres, including the Haymarket, Covent Garden and Drury Lane.
Volume 10
Leah Sumbel, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Sumbel, Part II (1811)
[A Gentleman], Memoirs of George Anne Bellamy (1785)
Enchanting Bellamy, as a subsequent biographer describes her, is here represented in a version, which plucks detail from a much longer account of her life by Georgiane Bellamy herself. In the 1760s, Bellamy put together six volumes of autobiography, using the popular epistolary form of the time. Annexed to her Apology for the life of G.A.B. is a letter from her partner of many years, John Calcraft, Esq.,which was advertised for publication in 1767. What followed, according to Bellamy, was a violent suppression of the letter (and the autobiography) by Calcraft, whom she accuses variously of being a true disciple of Machiavel, a dark assassin, another Midas, a Moloch, Mammon and Lucifer. She describes her motivation for writing and publishing her memoirs, as arising from a need to defend her own reputation against calumny.
The Life and Memoirs of the late Miss Ann Catley by Miss Ambross (c.1789)
Ann Catley, born in 1745 near the Tower of London, was a precociously talented singer, whose parents abused her services in the family home and failed to appreciate her assets until, at the age of 14, she had an affair with a linen draper and spent a week away from them. By then, though, it was too late to prevent Ann from entering into prostitution and succumbing to the advances of a number of suitors of high rank, the first and most notable of which was Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a fortune hunter, whose pursuit of Isabella Pawlet, or rather her money, had already landed him with a law suit. Miss Ambross’s liveliest insight into Miss Ann Catley as performer, comes in the final pages of the memoir, where Catley is likened to Nell Gwynn, actress and mistress of King Charles II, not only for dalliance with those of royal blood, but also for humble origins, a tendency towards frank speech and vulgar wit, impulses of generosity towards the poor and early fame as stage performers.
Elizabeth Billington, Memoirs of Mrs Billington (1792)
Elizabeth Billington, like Ann Catley, overcame the disadvantages of a difficult childhood (implying that both father and brother were abusive) to become a professional performer, who was also a fine musician. This, though, is certainly not the version of Mrs Billington, in which her publisher, James Ridgway, the author of most of the memoir, invests. Ridgway, in the supposed interests of defending the rights of the publisher and the moral probity of the stage, styles himself the hero and Mrs Billington the villain of the piece, as he documents his refusal to be intimidated by husbands and lawyers, who, at her request, attempted to block publication. However, when Ridgway intensifies his attempt to impugn Billington, in publishing her letters to her mother, he inadvertently gives the reader an opportunity to hear Eliza Billington’s own voice, educated, intimate and moving.