List of Figures; Series Editor’s Preface; Acknowledgements; A Note on Dame Ellen Terry; Introduction: Setting the Stage: Views of Victorian Theatre; 1. An Actress’s Tears: Authenticity and the Reassertion of Social Class; 2. The Actress at Home: Domesticity, Respectability, and the Disruption of Class Hierarchies; 3. The Actress and Her Audience: Performance, Authorship, and the Exceptional Woman in George Eliot; 4. Novelistic Naturalism: ‘The Ideal Mother Cannot Be the Great Artist’; 5. From Playing Parts to Re-writing Roles: Actresses and the Political Stage; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.