Her mother was Ellen Terry, the most admired actress of the day. Her brother was Edward Gordon Craig, the celebrated stage designer. Little wonder then that Edith Craig was overshadowed for most of her life by two such towering figures.
Yet her theatrical achievements were substantial. She was a talented costume designer and maker, the founder of the radical theatre group the Pioneer Players, and an indefatigable producer and director of countless plays and pageants. She was also an important figure in the suffrage movement, staging many feminist plays, and lived in a famous artistic lesbian ménage-à-trois. After her mother’s death she turned her cottage, Smallhythe Place in Kent, into a permanent museum dedicated to her memory, and established the Barn Theatre in the garden, where leading West End actors such as her cousin John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft and Edith Evans took part in an annual summer performance.
It was her personality which prevented her from achieving more. She was brusque, stubborn and invariably in the right. Nicknamed ‘Boney’, her style of directing was dictatorial; Virginia Woolf satirised her as the bossy pageant organiser Miss La Trobe in her novel Between the Acts. When it was suggested she might join the Old Vic, Lilian Baylis remarked: ‘We don’t want Edy here, she would upset the staff.’ She once threatened to fine actors who forgot their lines. Yet many of them admired her ability and perceptiveness as a director. Sybil Thorndike, who remembers coming away from rehearsals ‘bruised beyond words’ after ‘a lashing’, even considered her a genius.
Her steeliness was present from early childhood. When her brother Teddy dried and said he was afraid of the dark, she exhorted him to ‘Be a woman!’ Forthright to a fault, at the age of 11 she criticised Tennyson’s new play to his face, after the poet had read it to her mother and Henry Irving. Later she ticked off Irving, advising him to speak as naturally on stage as he did off it.
Her relationship with Ellen Terry was a complex mixture of mutual love and a struggle for power, each of them policing the other’s relationships with men. Ellen twice made Edy break off an engagement, while Edy resented her mother’s third husband, James Carew, and refused to meet them together. Yet Ellen apparently accepted her daughter’s lesbian household, which she set up with the writer Christopher St John and the artist Clare Atwood (Vita Sackville-West disdainfully labelled the trio ‘The Trouts’).
Edy Was a Lady contains her previously unpublished memoirs, scrupulously edited by Ann Rachlin. Written after Ellen’s death, they provide detailed backstage recollections of the famous Terry-Irving partnership at the Lyceum, where Edy played several small roles. Often accompanying Ellen on tour, she gives a vivid account of a journey across America, and of meeting such luminaries such as Sarah Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry, J. M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw.
These clear-eyed, unpretentious and affectionate memoirs belie Edy’s dragon image, and will feed the growing interest in this undervalued theatrical pioneer.
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