A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families

Deemed "a prodigy among biographers" by "The New York Times Book Review," Michael Holroyd transformed biography into an art. Now he turns his keen observation, humane insight, and epic scope on an ensemble cast, a remarkable dynasty that presided over the golden age of theater. Ellen Terry was an ethereal beauty, the child bride of a Pre-Raphaelite painter who made her the face of the age. George Bernard Shaw was so besotted by her gifts that he could not bear to meet her, lest the spell she cast from the stage be broken. Henry Irving was an ambitious, harsh-voicedmerchant's clerk, but once he painted his face and spoke the lines of Shakespeare, his stammer fell away to reveal a magnetic presence. He would become one of the greatest actor-managers in the history of the theater. Together, Terry and Irving created a powerhouse of the arts in London's Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker--who would go on to write "Dracula"--as manager. Celebrities whose scandalous private lives commanded global attention, they took America by stormin wildly popular national tours. Their all-consuming professional lives left little room for their brilliant but troubled children. Henry's boys followed their father into the theater but could not escape the shadow of his fame. Ellen's feminist daughter, Edy, founded an avant-garde theater and a largely lesbian community at her mother's country home. But it was Edy's son, the revolutionary theatrical designer Edward Gordon Craig, who possessed the most remarkable gifts and the most perplexing inability to realize them. A now forgotten modernist visionary, he collaborated with the Russian director Stanislavski on a production of "Hamlet "that forever changed the way theater was staged. Maddeningly self-absorbed, he inherited his mother's potent charm and fathered thirteen children by eight women, including a daughter with the dancer Isadora Duncan. An epic story spanning a century of cultural change, "A Strange Eventful History "finds space for the intimate moments of daily existence as well as the bewitching fantasies played out by its subjects. Bursting with charismatic life, it is an incisive portrait of two families who defied the strictures of their time. It will be swiftly recognized as a classic.

Review :
Praise for "Lytton Strachey": "The best literary biography to appear for years. It may well prove revolutionary." --"The New York Times""" Praise for "Bernard Shaw": "We regard Holroyd with awe, as a prodigy among biographers." --"The New York Times Book Review" “This is Michael Holroyd’s first extended feat of biographical writing since his monumental three-volume life of George Bernard Shaw, completed nearly twenty years ago. "A Strange Eventful History "is magnificent—not just as a fascinating exercise in group biography, but as a masterpiece of comic writing. I can think of no higher compliment than to say that I think Proust would have been addicted to it, had it been published in time.” —Paul Taylor, "New Statesman "“Holroyd has a wonderful eye for detail, often almost obsessive, but never redundant . . . He also has a dramatist’s ear for dialogue and for making all the minor characters interesting. Add to this a nose for a good story and a wit that often undermines his subjects’ seriousness without ever capsizing it, and you have an entirely captivating biography which ranks alongside his "Bernard Shaw "and his "Lytton Strachey "as one of the glories of the form.” —Richard