When Romeo was a woman : Charlotte Cushman and her circle of female spectators
Charlotte Cushman, the most famous actress of the nineteenth-century English-speaking world, challenged Victorian notions of gender in her stage portrayals of male characters and of strong, androgynous female characters. In this engrossing and groundbreaking biography, Lisa Merrill draws upon unpublished archival material and current theories of spectatorship and lesbian history to reveal how Cushman's career, relationships, and posthumous reception reflected the period's contradictory attitudes toward female performers, independent women, and the unspeakable possibilities of same-sex desire
Print Book, English, 2000
First paperback edition View all formats and editions
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000
Biographies
xxv, 318 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780472107995, 9780472087495, 0472107992, 0472087495
47112443
Crossings: passion embodied and remembered
The hero in the family and on the stage
"Is such love wrong?"
Embodying strong( -minded) women: the shapes Charlotte Cushman wore onstage
Wearing the breeches: Charlotte Cushman's male roles
Scribbling circles and strange sympathies: Charlotte Cushman's London circle of lovers and friends
Building a community: Charlotte Cushman's Roman salon
The Sapphic family
The backlash and beyond