Women’s Writing, Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 39 Authentic Performance in Theatrical Women’s Fiction of the 1870s SARAH BILSTON ABSTRACT This article both uncovers a forgotten genre of women’s writing and intervenes into recent critical debates about the status of the actress in Victorian literature and culture. In the 1870s and early 1880s a number of women’s novels were published that presented acting as a noble and ennobling profession. Such texts didactically engaged with traditional portrayals of theatrical life as dissolute and depraved and described it instead as a profession requiring all a woman’s powers of endurance and self-sacrifice. The novels appear, therefore, to incorporate rather than challenge conservative mythologies of womanhood; the article argues, however, that the challenge to those mythologies comes precisely from the texts’ refusal to accept that public life taints a woman. The novels compound their attack on ideals of domestic, compliant femininity through sympathetically evoked scenes of self-directed acting: authentic female performance emerges as the self-governed expression of the insurgent impulse to act. Such texts therefore represent an intriguingly nuanced contribution to Victorian debates about the “essential” nature and appropriate sphere of women. I Nineteenth-century literature typically represents the female theatrical performer as a social pariah, a transgressive figure beyond the pale of polite society. Acting – as critics from Jonas Barish to Nina Auerbach have argued – constitutes a troubling display of human inauthenticity (actors pretend to be something they are not): Victorian commentators found female theatrical performance particularly unsettling because it conflicted with ideals of women as purifying agents by evincing their ability to deceive.[1] Geraldine Jewsbury’s hero in The Half-Sisters (1848) is disturbed by female performers for just this reason: they “‘do not believe what they profess to set forth,’” he pronounces disgustedly; “‘they do it for a piece of silver and a morsel of bread, and get out of it as soon as they can.’”[2] Virtuous Victorian heroines are therefore at pains to distance