Strange Eventful History, A

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Ellen Terry was a natural actress who filled the theatre with a magical radiance. The Times called her the ‘uncrowned queen of England’ but behind her public success lay a darker story. The child-bride of G. F. Watts, she eloped with a friend of Oscar Wilde at 21 and gave birth to 2 illegitimate children. But her greatest partnership was on-stage, with legendary actor-manager and tragedian Henry Irving. At the Lyceum Theatre in London, the two of them created a grand Cathedral of the Arts. Their intimately-involved lives exceeded in plot the Shakespearean dramas they performed on stage – and indeed were curiously affected by them. They also influenced the life and work of their remarkable children, Ellen’s children in particular. Edy Craig, who founded a feminist theatre group, The Pioneer Players, established a lesbian community whose complex love-affairs make those of the Bloomsbury Group appear quite conventional. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary stage designer who collaborated with Stanislavski on a spectacular production of Hamlet in Moscow, is revealed by this book to be the forgotten man of modernism. He had 13 children by 8 women (including the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan) – perhaps the most extraordinary man Michael Holroyd has ever written about.

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Besides the Lives of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He is the current president of the Royal Society of Literature and the only non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.