Ellen Terry, photograph, a lumen cabinet card, 1898 (Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library)

March 18: 'Ellen Terry' talk

Library announces presentation 'Ellen Terry: A Life in Letters' by Katharine Cockin

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2:49 p.m., Feb. 26, 2015--The University of Delaware Library has announced the forthcoming presentation titled “Ellen Terry: A Life in Letters” by Katharine Cockin, professor of English at the University of Hull in England, at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 18, in Library Instruction Room 114 in the Morris Library. 

A reception will follow in Room 115A, which is the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection.

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The most famous actress of her time, Ellen Terry (1847-1928) was internationally renowned for her leading roles in the Lyceum Theatre’s lavish Shakespearean productions. Her Lady Macbeth was immortalized by John Singer Sargent in the stunning portrait of her forceful pose in beetle-jeweled costume.

After her death, her correspondence with George Bernard Shaw was published and provided her with a posthumous reputation of a different kind. Virginia Woolf regarded the letters as “some of the best letters in the language.” 

Terry’s son, Edward Gordon Craig, described the publication of his mother’s letters in terms of violation and exposure. 

This talk will explore the phenomenon of “Ellen Terry’s letters,” drawing on new insights from The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry project (2010-17), an eight-volume publication drawn from over 3,000 letters. 

Cockin is editor of The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry (Pickering & Chatto, 2010-17). She has also edited Ellen Terry, Lives of the Shakespearian Actors (2012) and Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence (2011), and is the author of Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives (1998) and Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players 1911-1925 (Palgrave 2001). 

She was principal investigator of the AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database project (2006-08), resulting in the online catalogue of the National Trust’s Ellen Terry and Edith Craig archive of over 20,000 documents, one of the most significant theatre archives in the United Kingdom. The completion of this project facilitated the National Trust’s relocation of most of the archive to the British Library.

Cockin is coming to the University of Delaware to consult the extensive Ellen Terry materials in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library.

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