Leading ladies

GEORGE ROWELL

Ellen Terry Roger Manvell (Heinemann 45s) Rachel and the New World Leon Beauvallet translated and edited by Colin Clair (Abelard- Schuman 25s) The greatest difficulty a biographer of Ellen Terry faces is the existence, in The Story of My Life, of the finest autobiography in English theatrical literature. It is sometimes evasive (intentionally and unintentionally) but it con- jures up a world and its inhabitants with a skill which would be admirable in a profes- sional writer and is miraculous in the child of strolling players, herself without formal edu- cation of any kind. Mr Manvell's task is also complicated by the fact that infinitely the most important part—though less than half the sum —of his subject's career was her partnership with Irving at the Lyceum, and this chapter has been definitively told by Laurence Irving.

His biography, therefore, must stand or fall by its handling of the episodes Ellen Terry herself left untold, and these chiefly consist of her relations with three men, each a major artist in his own field : her first husband, G. F. Watts; the father of her children, E. W. God- win; and her partner, Henry Irving. Mr Man- vell's handling of the nine-month marriage to Watts is beyond reproach. He sketches in the shadowy figure of Watts himself, skilfully uses (with the aid of an art expert, David Loshak) the evidence of the painter's work at this time, and sums up an obscure and painful episode as fairly as could be wished or hoped.

He is less successful with the Godwin romance—and the pictures of Godwin he reproduces do not help him. 'Strikingly hand- some' is the last impression they convey of Ellen's one true love. Some of her letters to a friend, Mary Anne Hall, printed here for the first time, vividly illustrate her mood after the separation from Watts, and go far to explain- ing her elopement with the fascinating Godwin, but Mr Manvell can throw little new light on the splendours and miseries of life at Harpen- den and none at all on the quarrel in London which precipitated Godwin's marriage to a twenty-one year old pupil, only two months before Watts began the divorce proceedings which could have legitimised the two Craig children.

The much longer liaison with Henry Irving is at once better lit and more obscure. Mr Man- veil has the evidence of Irving's letters to Ellen published in Gordon Craig's Index to the Story of My Days, which were not avail- able for Laurence Irving's biography. Never-

theless, he concludes that a love affair between them would have endangered their reputations, and discounts Ellen's remark to Marguerite

Steen (printed in A Pride of Terra's) that 'of course' she was Irving's mistress. Their rela-

tionship, he maintains, was on a higher level. As, in the letters reprinted here, Irving calls Ellen 'my dearest dearest' and 'my own dear wife' and signs himself 'your own fond love' and 'your own till Death,' one can only add:

a very high level. Ellen's second and third marriages are much more confidently treated.

Her desire to have younger men close (but not too close) to her is admirably illustrated from her letters to Stephen Coleridge and Graham Robertson, and one's sympathies are roused for the two uncomprehending husbands —Charles Kelly and James Carew—she first accepted and then rejected. As her son said: She was not a marriageable person.'

That Mr Manvell's account of Ellen Terry the actress suffers from over-familiar material

is certainly not his fault. The chapters on her Lyceum career have some fresh touches (notably the extracts from Alice Comyns Carr, her dress designer) and there is a valuable selec- tion of her notes on the interpretation of Lady Macbeth. It is a little disappointing that the last years of her career—not properly covered

by The Story of My Life or its edited version, Ellen Terry's Memoirs—should be summarily

treated, since they included her only appear- ances in Shaw, Barrie and Ibsen (under her son's direction) and her last appearance in Shakespeare, but Mr Manvell does include some fascinating information about her film performances. The book's standards are some- times less than scholarly: apart from obvious misprints, there are references to 'James Macready,"John Wilkins Booth,' Mrs Abing-

don' and 'Old Hare' (for old Howe), The Iron Checr is stated to have been 'orginally written for Edmund Kean' (at the age of nine?) and

on page 102 the subject's year of birth is given as 1848, after a careful introductory note estab- lishing it as 1847.

The American chapter is the least interesting, for Mr Manvell cannot enliven the itinerary of towns, theatres and plays which are the basis of such episodes. Leon Beauvallet, a member of Rachel's company during her ill- fated tour of America in 1855-56, wrote on their return a brief account of the experience. This book, first published in 1856 (according to the text, though the introduction to this edition states 1865), now appears in English for the first time and still makes lively reading, though the reader's mirth is muted, for Beau- vallet records Rachel's indisposition during their first New York engagement, the serious cold she contracted on the unheated stage of the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, and her last appearance (on any stage) at Charleston. Within two years of her return she was dead of consumption.

Beauvallet's style (well rendered by the trans- lator) is lightly condescending towards his American audiences. He finds fault with most aspects of their civilisation, their hotels, their railways, their roads and sidewalks, their pre- occupation with arson and murder, above all

their cuisine. The book apparently caused brave offence when first published but it is

innocuously entertaining now. There is a

splendid story of an American lady, having purchased her translation of Bajazet, following it in ignorance of the introduction of Le Mari de la Veuve as a curtain-raiser, and fleeing in panic when the company began a seemingly sixth act of Bajazet.