The Actress in Nature: Environments of Artistic Development in Victorian Fiction and Memoir

This essay provides a new approach to reading actress memoirs in light of the influence of environmental thinking on Victorian culture more broadly and acting theory in particular. By demonstrating that actress autobiographies were written within a discursive domain that understood human temperaments and biographical trajectories to be fundamentally shaped by social and physical surroundings, I examine how renowned actresses narrate the conditions within which their temperament developed. In order to do so, I first examine the entanglement of environment and character in novels about actress protagonists in order to develop a framework for analysing the narrative qualities of actress memoirs. This essay focuses specifically on the trope of the ‘wild’ girl who, undisciplined by parents or teachers, develops a sensitive yet wilful and even anti-social temperament that enables her to become an actress praised for her authentic displays of spontaneous emotion