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A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives Of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving And Their Remarkable Families (2008)

by Michael Holroyd(Favorite Author)

3.66 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0701179872 (ISBN13: 9780701179878)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Chatto & Windus

review 1: An interesting if odd book that covers a wide array of people who had relationships with one of the families. But I was obsessed with Edward Craig's being a cad through the whole second half of the book. Impregnating women and going about his way as if "genius" was an excuse. Abandoning his children and growing indignant when demands were made on him on their behalf. I don't think Holroyd was as judgmental as he could have been (I would have raked him over the coals). He does occasionally throw a sarcastic aside. Anyway, I would say it is a book for people who love the theater and know something about it. I think they probably would have gotten more out of it than I did.
review 2: Ellen Terry and Henry Irving dominated the Victorian stage in ways that ar... moree difficult to imagine today, in a pre-cinema, pre-Twitter age. As disciplined and determined as these two performers were, their personal lives were chaotic and devastating to their partners, lovers, children, friends, and hangers-on. A bit of trivia -- Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, devoted his life to making Henry Irving's life possible, only to be snubbed cruelly by him near the end, a snub he never recovered from and never forgave. Where Terry was fleeting emotions and shifting sensibilities, the classic evanescent performer, Irving was solid, solitary, and grim. Where Terry was never without admirers, hangers-on, and children looked after by a bewildering array of lovers, consorts and admirers, Irving spent half of his life virtually alone, and certainly isolated, learning his craft. And yet thousands thronged the streets upon his death, for a last look at the dour colossus of the stage. Holroyd's book is always fascinating, but frequently frustrating, because he has a hard time not mirroring the chaos of the two principal's lives in the structure of his book. And characters come and go at speed, each requiring a paragraph or page of introduction to be placed in the Terry or Irving world, only to disappear and never come up again. Holroyd was apparently keen to show the lives of Terry and Irving's families and especially their children, each of whom struggles to follow in the footsteps of these monstrous people and each of whose lives takes one tragic turn after another. As such, he sometimes takes the children's own descriptions of what they're doing at face value -- presumably because the only documentation comes from their own letters -- and that's a mistake, because their own 'takes' on their lives are not defensible. Several were mini-monsters themselves, and what they say about themselves needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt.A brilliant, chaotic book about how 2 brilliant, chaotic families intertwine. less

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