First knight and his lady

A Strange, Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, by Michael Holroyd

It is rare today to come across a non-fiction book that does not include in its title or subtitle the assertion that the tale it tells is ‘remarkable’, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘fas- cinating’, publishers presumably having decided that we readers are unlikely to guess that a book might be interesting unless it says so on the cover. Inevitably, these claims have become devalued. Michael Holroyd, perhaps in ironic homage to this trend, puts no less than four appetite-whetting adjectives on his menu, with the original twist that the feast they advertise actually satisfies them all.

Any one of the lives told here would make resonant reading; related together they enrich and make sense of each other, providing mutual contexts. The alliance, which spanned a quarter of a century, between Ellen Terry (three husbands, two illegitimate children) and Henry Irving (one wife, two children, estranged from all three) elevated the status of the theatre to a degree which would have been unimaginable when they first played opposite each other in 1867.

Despite the fact that both Irving and Terry discouraged their children from entering the profession, all four were destined for the theatre, the three boys rejecting more respectable careers and Terry’s daughter, Edith Craig, who Terry hoped would study at Girton, ‘had her own ideas and easily succeeded in failing the entrance exam’. Her life, and the life of her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, could not, aside from their shared devotion to theatre production, have been more different: Edith lived with another woman for nearly 50 years, while Edward left a long trail of illegitimate children and abandoned women in his wake, as well as his wife — each time he tried to leave her he merely left her pregnant again — and their four children.