Passion Play.(Ellen Terry)

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

Ellen Terry made the world her stage.

Thomas Hardy described the preeminent Victorian actress Ellen Terry as a "sea anemone without shadow"; John Singer Sargent painted her as Lady Macbeth in a dress covered with shimmering beetle wings. "Ellen Terry is the most beautiful name in the world; it rings like a chime through the last quarter of the nineteenth century," wrote George Bernard Shaw. (They later became lifelong friends.)

A showstopper in its own right, Michael Holroyd's rollicking collective biography A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) traces the influence of the woman who, along with the legendary tragedian Sir Henry Irving, ruled the golden age of British theater. Drawing from an array of sources, Holroyd, whose books on Shaw and Lytton Strachey set the bar for literary biography, brings to life the gaslit stage on which Terry and Irving enacted the suppressed passions of the publicas well as their darker, behind-the-scenes story.

Born into a family of actors in 1847, Terry had her first Shakespearean role at nineMamillius in The Winter's Tale . In London with her sister as a teen, she drew the attention of the portraitist George Frederic Watts, who induced her to be his model, then his wife. Ellen, not quite seventeenWatts was 47impulsively agreed. Ill cast in the role of child bride, Terry soon returned to her family, only to disappear again at 21. Terry's parents presumed her deada fair-haired girl was found floating in the Thamesbut in fact she had run off with Edward William Godwin, an influential, often insolvent architect. To support their two ...