Staging a Female Identity: Representations of the female actor in Ellen Terry's The story of my life and Henry James's The tragic muse

Abstract

Abstract This thesis examines the actor Ellen Terry's construction of her own female identity through analysis of critics' writings of her, her own writing in her autobiography The Story of My Life (1908) and how she is depicted in three photographs and one oil sketch. Terry's construction of self is compared to Henry James's construction of a female actor in his novel The Tragic Muse (1890) and how he writes a figure that functions as an actor at every textual level. The blurred lines between actor, role, author, figure, artist and model are reflected in the different media Terry is represented through.