1. Postlewait, Thomas, “Autobiography and Theatre History,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Postlewait, Thomas and McConachie, Bruce A. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 248–72Google Scholar, at 253.

2. Ibid.

3. Feminist critics in particular have explored how autobiography can form the basis for less masculinist historical narratives. See Canning, Charlotte, “Constructing Experience: Theorizing a Feminist Theatre History,” Theatre Journal 45.4 (1993): 529–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corbett, Mary Jean, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Corbett, “Performing Identities: Actresses and Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109–26. In the past decade, there has also been significant work done on autobiographical narrative as a strategy of performance or of dramatic writing, as, for example, in Gale, Maggie B. and Gardner, Viv, ed., Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

4. For studies of these print networks, see, for example, Drew, John M. L., Dickens the Journalist (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Easley, Alexis, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004)Google Scholar; Rubery, Matthew, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mulrooney, Jonathan, Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Newey, Katherine, “Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. John, Juliet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 659–74Google Scholar, at 664.

6. Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 129Google Scholar (italics in the original) and 43.

7. Erika Fischer-Lichte defines the “bodily co-presence of actor(s) and spectators” as both the physical act of “‘being here,’ before the gaze of an other” and the cognitive awareness of being present as an embodied mind in an unusually intense way. See Fischer-Lichte, “Appearing as an Embodied Mind—Defining a Weak, a Strong, and a Radical Concept of Presence,” in Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being, ed. Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks (London: Routledge, 2012), 106.

8. Schneider writes that “studying a medium in its liveness, its ‘nowness,’ may seem against the grain of the project of history—a project that, by most accounts, seeks to analyze the ‘then’ in some distinction to the ‘now.’ Even if a history brings us ‘up to the minute,’ few historians would claim it's the minute shared by the reader in a ‘co-presence’ akin to theatre”; Rebecca Schneider, Theatre & History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3. Richardson's phrase is from his “Preface” to The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 7 vols. [1753] (New York: Croscup & Sterling, 1883), 1: xxxvii–xxxix, at xxxix.

9. In Postal Pleasures, Kate Thomas argues that Victorian “postal plots” differ from earlier epistolary fictions in that “[t]hings that were ancillary to the letter—envelopes, stamps, postmarks, and even postmen's thumbprints—became narratively all consuming… . Rather than thrilling the reader with intimate access to the contents of Clarissa's or Pamela's letters, postal plots found excitement in the distance, separation, delays, and precipitous deliveries that could skew the trajectory of a communication, or reveal how skewed any communicative trajectory always is”; Thomas, Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2. The nineteenth-century examples of epistolarity that I consider here confirm elements of this distinction while also complicating it. Although the epistolary liveness I investigate is certainly characterized by precarity and distance, for example, I also argue that Collins and Kemble use the formal strategies within their letters to create a sense of embodied immediacy.

10. Joe Bray, The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (London: Routledge, 2003), 1. As Bray notes, the epistolary novel is often limited to the long eighteenth century, or “the 120 years from Roger L'Estrange's first translation of Les Lettres portugaises in 1678 to Jane Austen's decision in late 1797 or early 1798 to transform the probably epistolary ‘Elinor and Marianne’ into the third-person narrative of Sense and Sensibility”; ibid., 1. Bray attempts to raise epistolary narrative's profile by positioning it as an important precursor for explorations of consciousness in the Victorian novel. Other influential studies of epistolary fiction that extend into the nineteenth century include Linda S. Kauffman's Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), which includes chapters on Jane Eyre and Turn of the Screw; Mary A. Favret's Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), which includes analyses of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; and Rachel Scarborough King's Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which discusses canonical novels like Northanger Abbey alongside anonymous periodicals.

11. In addition to sharing social space with writers like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell at the house of poet Bryan Waller Procter, Collins and Kemble also had overlapping networks of reception: not only in print publication (Collins published several short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, for example, where Records of a Girlhood first appeared as “Old Woman's Gossip” in 1875) but also within exchanges of performance letters (as in Marie Bancroft's Gleanings from “On and Off the Stage,” which collects three “Letters from Fanny Kemble, Pierre Berton, and Wilkie Collins” under that one heading). The two authors also shared at least one fictional link: Collins's actor-protagonist Mr. Wray, in Mr Wray's Cash-Box; or, The Mask and the Mystery (1851), devotes his career to the memory of Fanny Kemble's uncle, actor John Philip Kemble. See Mrs. [Marie] Bancroft, Gleanings from “On and Off the Stage” (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1892), 219–21.

12. Postlewait, 254.

13. In their introduction to Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 1–25, editors Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven describe a dominant strand of criticism that associates epistolary narrative with the rise of middle-class ideologies of feminine domesticity in the eighteenth century. Studies like Favret's Romantic Correspondence have helped complicate this narrative by drawing attention to a wider archive of epistolary fictions, in which the letter form is not always associated with interiority and the private. By investigating the intersection between epistolary modes and nineteenth-century theatre—a medium often associated with exteriority and the public—I contribute to the project of theorizing a more complex epistolarity while also drawing on its associations with feminine authorship.

14. Theories of disability in and as performance have been crucial to studies of the nineteenth century, the era during which Rosemarie Garland Thompson argues the category of the “freak” was consolidated. See Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Garland Thompson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 2. By representing nineteenth-century actresses through the language of gendered impairment (particularly in scenes of hysteria, immobility, fainting, fatigue, and fever), the authors I study here participate in a wider nineteenth-century fascination with gender in/as disability performance, as analyzed in essays like Petra Kuppers, “Bodies, Hysteria, Pain: Staging the Invisible,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 147–62; Kate Mattacks, “‘Natural Pantomime’: Spectacle, Silence, and Speech Disability,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 37.1 (2010): 33–44; Ellen Samuels, “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37.1 (2011): 53–81; and Susan Kattwinkel, “The Tradition of the Eccentric Body in Vaudeville: Subversion and Power in Performance,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 24.3 (2012): 5–22.

15. Altman, 140.

16. Adelaide Kemble to Therese Maria Anna van Thun (1784–1844; née van Brühl), May 1839. Garrick Club Library Collection, LIB/Kemble/1/21.

17. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2.

18. Adelaide Kemble to van Thun, LIB/Kemble/1/21; emphasis in the original. Vincenzo Bellini's 1835 opera I puritani (The Puritans), following its successful premiere in Paris, was performed annually in a number of cities for the next ten years.

19. See Altman, especially 118 and 135.

20. Squire Bancroft and Marie Bancroft, Mr. & Mrs. Bancroft On and Off the Stage,2d ed., 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1888), 1: 311–12, emphasis in original.

21. Ibid., 1: 416–17.

22. Altman, 148.

23. All of Terry's letters are cited from the V&A Collections, correspondence dated 1888 and 1889, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/archive/ARC73666 and http://collections.vam.ac.uk/archive/ARC73667. Emphasis in original.

24. Macbeth's letter “deliver[s]” the promise of what will be to Lady Macbeth, who then takes up and tests the temporality of what “art,” “shalt,” and “wouldst” be. See William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015): 1.5.1–33. I am grateful to Marlis Schweitzer for bringing this parallel to Lady Macbeth's diegetic letter writing to my attention. For more on the complexities of reading, reception, and recirculation in this scene, see Cordelia Zukerman, “Equivocations: Reading the Shakespeare/Middleton Macbeth,” Shakespeare Survey 66 (2013): 24–37.

25. Schneider, Theatre & History, 68.

26. Rayner, Ghosts, 2. Sarah Bay-Cheng's work on digital performance and spectatorship, for example, outlines how new technologies for documenting performance put pressure on the distinction between mediated recording and live event. I consider letters to be one of the “analogue predecessors” to the digital images Bay-Cheng discusses. Though not nearly as easy to produce, manipulate, and disseminate as Instagram photos, letters allowed nineteenth-century audiences to experiment with mediating, extending, and recirculating liveness. See Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27.3 (2017): 324–39, at 338.

27. Wilkie Collins, “Preface,” in No Name [1862], ed. Mark Ford (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), xxvii–xxviii. Subsequent page citations for this novel appear parenthetically in the text, preceded by the letter C[ollins].

28. Ford, “Introduction,” in No Name, vii–xvii, at vii.

29. I include a discussion of Wragge's “chronicles” under the heading of epistolarity not only because, as I discuss later, they describe the exchange of letters and gesture insistently toward the letter's “I–you” form of address, but also because epistolary novels often incorporate diary entries, newspaper clippings, or legal testimonies as part of their documentary, “present-tense” narration.

30. As Alison Booth notes, “Few women's lives have been so public, so published, before the rise of a twentieth-century style of stardom”; Booth, “From Miranda to Prospero: The Works of Fanny Kemble,” Victorian Studies 38.2 (1995): 227–54, at 227.

31. In addition to Booth, see also Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989); Catherine Burroughs, “‘The Father Foster'd at His Daughter's Breast’: Fanny Kemble and The Grecian Daughter,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28.4 (2006): 335–45; and Deirdre David, Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

32. Frances Anne Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1878), 1: 1–2. Subsequent page citations for this work appear parenthetically in the text, preceded by the letter K[emble].

33. Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) has detailed the Victorian anxiety about actresses, who posed a threat to ideals of middle-class femininity and endangered the bourgeois binary between public and private space. Many actresses responded to this pressure in their autobiographical writing, often by emphasizing the conventionality of their home lives.

34. Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 146Google Scholar.

35. Scholars of Wilkie Collins's fiction have noted the frequency with which he represents disabled characters. As Kate Flint notes in “Disability and Difference,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 153–67, Collins's fiction “repeatedly foregrounds a number of individuals who are challenged in their relationship to the material world,” with a particular interest in the intersection between disability and female sexuality (153). See also Holmes, Martha Stoddard, “‘Bolder with Her Lover in the Dark’: Collins and Disabled Women's Sexuality,” in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, ed. Bachman, Maria K. and Cox, Don Richard (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 59–93Google Scholar; and Holmes, Stoddard, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Auslander, Philip, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34.3 (2012): 3–11Google Scholar, at 3.

37. Schneider, Rebecca, “Archive Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6.2 (2001): 100–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 106.