Laura Engel

A series of letters housed in the Cambridge Library and published in 1904, in a volume entitled A... more A series of letters housed in the Cambridge Library and published in 1904, in a volume entitled An Artist’s Love Story edited by Oswald G. Knapp, tells the story of a tragic love triangle between the celebrated artist Sir Thomas Lawrence and both of the famous actress Sarah Siddons’s daughters—Sally and Maria. During the course of the correspondence (1797–1800), Lawrence completed an extraordinary series of drawings and paintings of Sarah, Sally, and Maria Siddons . The wealth of narrative and visual material (both tangible and imagined) surrounding the actors in this ensemble creates a unique opportunity to consider how tangible materials connect to intangible traces. Using Rebecca Schneider’s concept of performing remains and Hanneke Grootenboer’s theory of “intimate vision,” I explore how as archival tourists we might consider the ways in which these artifacts “look back” at us from the past. Putting these materials together stages a form of reenactment for the archival tourist that mimics the experience of an interactive museum exhibition.

Epilogue: Body Double—Katharine Hepburn at Madame Tussauds

This chapter examines silhouettes and waxworks by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women a... more This chapter examines silhouettes and waxworks by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women artists in order to consider the ways in which these mysterious artifacts represent traces of the embodied presence of specific individuals. Viewing a silhouette connects the observer directly to the moment of the object’s creation—staging a kind of reenactment scenario across time. The extraordinary skill and technique of silhouette artists such as Isabella Beetham (1750–1825) and her daughter Jane Read (c. 1773–1800) provide insight into modes of late eighteenth-century style, gesture, and expression. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to waxworks, specifically to Madame Tussaud’s self-portraits. Encountering waxworks involves a sense of tangibility that disrupts the boundaries between spectators and objects. Silhouettes and waxworks are both quintessential tourist objects because they are things that are specifically connected to technologies of presence. I argue that the particular properties of silhouettes and waxworks as media are analogous to how women have appeared and disappeared in the archives, as well as the ways in which women’s embodied experiences are mediated through material representations that both preserve and obscure their presence.

This epilogue looks at an unusual scene occurring at Madame Tussauds in the Katharine Hepburn fil... more This epilogue looks at an unusual scene occurring at Madame Tussauds in the Katharine Hepburn film A Woman Rebels (1936). The mostly contrived plot of the movie hinges on the episode at the wax museum—where nothing and everything happens. For the spectator or fan, encountering a life size wax figure of a famous person highlights the boundaries between life and death, authenticity and artifice, creating an uncanny effect that is similar to being in close proximity to a celebrity. Famous people’s bodies are in many ways untouchable, sacred, and idealised. The epilogue highlights the collection’s emphasis on the ways in which various technologies work to enhance and promote the illusion of intimacy and identification with famous figures.

The personating of Queens: Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons, and the creation of female celebrity in the late eighteenth century

Close Encounters: Frances Burney, Actresses, and Models for Female Celebrity

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2012

The Public's Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England

Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2018

This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Compa... more This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, Laura Engel argues that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality), thus participating in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and could also feel connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses. Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, suggests ways of seeing that, Engel contends, connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated women.

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2019

Forgotten Encounters: The Legacy of Sculptresses and Female Muses

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Sculpture as a medium is inherently connected to legacy making. In producing three- dimensional m... more Sculpture as a medium is inherently connected to legacy making. In producing three- dimensional monuments designed to withstand the test of time, women artists provided evidence of the lasting quality and permanence of their creative acts. This article examines the actress, sculptress and novelist Anne Damer’s sculpture of the famous actress turned Countess Eliza Farren (c. 1788), paying particular attention to the relationship between sculpture as a static art form that captures tactile embodied presence and the ephemerality of performance. Farren’s involvement in Damer’s staging of the private theatricals at Richmond House (Farren directed and Damer starred) suggests that their collaborative relationship engendered aesthetic acts across media – performances that are now lost but remain in traces across a variety of material. Similarly, in the mid nineteenth century the American artist Harriet Hosmer’s spectacular sculptures of female figures were inspired in part by her intimate r...

Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

The Shadow Jane

Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance

Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s

Introduction: The Archival Tourist

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

The introduction provides context for the main theoretical threads of this book: tourism theory, ... more The introduction provides context for the main theoretical threads of this book: tourism theory, performance theory, archive theory, and studies of women and material culture. I define and explore the idea of the “archival tourist” along with the strategies involved in curating the individual case studies in the book. In addition, I establish connections among the main figures in the narrative (Elizabeth Inchbald, Sally Siddons, The Countess of Blessington [Marguerite Gardiner], Isabella Beetham, Jane Read, Marie Tussaud, and Amelia M. Watson) and the trajectory of tangible objects (pocket diaries, paintings, magic lanterns, silhouettes, waxworks, and photographs) featured in each chapter.

Epilogue: Body Double—Katharine Hepburn at Madame Tussauds

Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon ed. by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2019

Amelia M. Watson’s Photographs

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

In 1915, the illustrator, photographer, and painter Amelia M. Watson, inspired by her fascination... more In 1915, the illustrator, photographer, and painter Amelia M. Watson, inspired by her fascination with the transatlantic actress, writer, and social historian Fanny Kemble’s memoir Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1864), traveled with two female companions to the remains of Kemble’s plantation located on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. Once there she took a stunning series of photographs of the plantation house, the surrounding landscape, and the descendants of the original enslaved people who lived there. In this chapter I explore what I call Amelia Watson’s “plantation tourism,” investigating the overlapping and contradictory narratives of sympathy, voyeurism, and aesthetic practice present in the interplay between Watson’s images, the texts that accompany her photographs, and the original narratives the images were meant to illustrate. Watson’s projects consciously and unconsciously reinforce the ideology of white supremacy, while at the same time specific photographs, particularly of female subjects, recreate and reimagine the haunting realities of the past, potentially providing a more progressive narrative of survival and renewal through their presence.

Stage beauties: Actresses and celebrity culture in the long eighteenth century

Literature Compass, 2016

Over the past 20 years, the study of eighteenth-century British actresses has blossomed into an e... more Over the past 20 years, the study of eighteenth-century British actresses has blossomed into an emerging interdisciplinary field. Early works on actresses in the 1990's coincided with a heightened interest in recovering non-canonical eighteenth-century texts by female authors as well as the publication of Judith Butler's ground breaking Gender Trouble in 1992. Actresses became, in many ways, the perfect vehicle for looking at how ideologies of femininity, performance, and embodiment materialized in eighteenth-century culture. The publication of Felicity Nussbaum's Rival Queens in 2010 signaled a new phase in actress studies. This article looks closely at the ways in which scholarship on eighteenth-century actresses and celebrity produced since 2010 responds to and/or complicates Nussbaum's invitation to move beyond the parameters of the lady/prostitute divide in actress studies towards more "productive frames of reference" and methodologies. In 2016, actress studies is a truly interdisciplinary field intersecting with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion. Scholars in actress studies have pioneered new theoretical approaches to theater history, archives and evidence, re-enactment and performance, as well as studies of sound and material culture. Studies of actresses have contributed significantly to the history of early modern women specifically focusing on maternity, professionalism, marriage, domestic life, and kinship networks. Considering "Actress Studies" as a distinct field highlights an important legacy of paradoxical ideologies about women, power, and fame that still operate today. In October of 2011 the lavish exhibition, "The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons," opened at the National Portrait Gallery to great acclaim. Promising "a vivid spectacle of femininity, fashion, and theatricality" the show highlighted "the intriguing and notorious performers of the period whose lives outside of the theatre ranged from royal mistresses to admired writers and business women." 1 Reviewing the exhibition for The Guardian, Tim Adams began by talking about images of Nell Gwyn's nipples commenting, "As the pinup girl of the Restoration, Nell Gwyn seems to have constantly fallen prey to wardrobe malfunctions." He describes the "energy" in images of Gwyn as located "not so much in the disorganized décolletage of the actress, however, but in the consummate coolness of her gaze. It's both shameless and knowing, this look; the screw-you stare of the authentic star." 2 Adams' point that apparently disaffected women and their nakedness still sell tickets today in the same way that they enticed audiences 300 years ago is in many ways still at the crux of our fascination with female performers, fame, and power. No matter how much attention scholars have paid to the significance of actresses' accomplishments-their professionalism, economic, artistic, and personal successes-the specter of their bodies on display continues to shape the conversation, albeit in new and different ways. While the histories of famous actresses have obsessed writers, artists, cultural critics, and fans since female performers first appeared on the stage in 1660, we still know relatively little about the everyday lives of professional women in and around the theater. Evidence about actresses is © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd characterized by the ways in which other people represented them-through reviews, portraits, caricatures, letters, diaries, memoirs, pamphlets, and poetry. As Maggie Gale explains, the study of actresses is often an investigation of what isn't there, a conjuring of pretty ghosts: Historically, the figure of the actress has often been marked by absence and by exclusion. The theatre of the English Renaissance, like that of the Greeks, was famously without women, although it is true that in both cases scholars continue to debate why this might have been and how absolute the prohibition actually was. In Catholic Europe performers, both male and female, while sometimes much admired, were denied full religious burial rites. There was clearly an entrenched unease about their power. By the eighteenth century many European actresses were celebrated not only for their physical presence but for their special capacity for feeling, their unique insights into human behaviour. At the same time their public 'femininity'-culturally created and projected-may even have exceeded that of the female roles they played. (Cambridge Companion to the Actress 1).

Epilogue: The Afterlife of Muffs

Austen, Actresses and Accessories, 2015

In the epilogue, I turn to Hugh Thomson’s illustrated edition of Sense and Sensibility (1902), wh... more In the epilogue, I turn to Hugh Thomson’s illustrated edition of Sense and Sensibility (1902), which features images of each of the primary female characters (Elinor, Marianne, and Lucy) holding muffs. I read these images alongside an entry from the “Ladies Encyclopedia” from 1910 entitled “On Muffs.” Curiously, the afterlife of the muff- its visual translation into editions of Austen’s novels — provides some insight into how readers were directed to conjure representations of the fashionable eighteenth-century past. As accessible and useful accessories, Muffs at the beginning of the twentieth century offered the potential for a more democratic vision of style, one in which every woman could have the opportunity to present themselves as fashionable.

Jane Austen as Fashion Plate: Musings on Muffs

Austen, Actresses and Accessories, 2015

Chapter 3 examines James Stanier Clarke’s fashionable sketch of Austen holding a muffin relation ... more Chapter 3 examines James Stanier Clarke’s fashionable sketch of Austen holding a muffin relation to other images we have of her, particularly the famous drawing of Austen by her sister Cassandra, and the recently discovered “unseen” portrait of her by Paula Byrne which, like the muff drawing has not been authenticated. The chapter considers the drawing of Austen, found in Clarke’s friendship book, alongside contemporary fashion plates and as a material artifact in and of itself. Austen’s connection to the muff is a provocative invitation to re-envision her awareness of Regency style and accessories. The way twenty-first-century readers wish to imagine Austen may be very different from the ways in which her contemporaries envisioned her.

Epilogue: Body Double—Katharine Hepburn at Madame Tussauds

The personating of Queens: Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons, and the creation of female celebrity in the late eighteenth century

Close Encounters: Frances Burney, Actresses, and Models for Female Celebrity

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2012

The Public's Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England

Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2018

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2019

Forgotten Encounters: The Legacy of Sculptresses and Female Muses

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

The Shadow Jane

Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance

Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s

Introduction: The Archival Tourist

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

Epilogue: Body Double—Katharine Hepburn at Madame Tussauds

Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon ed. by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2019

Amelia M. Watson’s Photographs

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory, 2018

Stage beauties: Actresses and celebrity culture in the long eighteenth century

Literature Compass, 2016