Abstract
In Henry Morgan’s 1912 biographical collection, The Canadian Man and Woman of the Time, Canadianborn actor Margaret Anglin — then aged 36 — was presented to the English-Canadian reading public as having created a ‘veritable sensation in the dramatic world’. Morgan cited theatre critics who compared her to Sarah Bernhardt; Bernhardt herself was quoted as speaking enthusiastically of Anglin’s work; and the American press hailed her as ‘one of the few great actresses the American stage possesses’. But Anglin’s reputation was not limited to US theatre circles for, as Morgan declared, she had also made very successful tours of Canada and Australia.2 Anglin, it seemed, was destined to assume a significant place in cultural history, in the country of her birth and internationally.
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Notes
Henry Morgan (1912) The Canadian Man and Woman of the Time, 2nd edn, Pt 1 (Toronto: Henry Briggs), p. 28
see also National Council of Women of Canada () Women of Canada: Their Life and Work (Ottawa), p. 238.
For Anglin’s career see Mary M. Brown (1990) ‘Entertainers of the Road’ in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.) Early Stages Theatre in Ontario, 1800–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 144–145;
Robert B. Scott (1997) ‘Professional Performers and Companies’ in Ann Saddlemyer and Richard Plant (eds) Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 1970s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 17–20.
This sketch of the key events of Anglin’s life has been taken from her biography written by her great-nephew: John LeVay (1985) Margaret Anglin a Stage Life (Toronto: Simon and Pierre).
See Angela Woollacott (2001) To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press) for discussions of actresses’ relationship to international networks.
Vincent Landro (2002) ‘Faking It: The Press Agent and Celebrity Theatre in Early Twentieth Century American Theatre’ Theatre History Studies No. 15, June, 95–114.
Margaret Anglin (1917) ‘How I Nearly Became a Leading Lady’ Every Woman’s World [EWW] January, 10.
Margaret Anglin (1916) ‘My Career,’ EWW December, 5, 43–46, 53, 55, 44.
See Russell A. Kazal (1999) ‘Irish “Race” and German “Nationality”: Catholic Languages of Ethnic Difference in Turn-of-the-Century Philadelphia’ in Reynolds J. Scott-Childress (ed.) Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism (New York: Garland), pp. 149–168;
J. R. Miller (1993) ‘Anti-Catholicism in Canada: From the British Conquest to the Great War’ in Terence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (eds) The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), pp. 25–48.
David Nasaw (1993) Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Harvard: Harvard University Press);
Linda Mizejewski (1999) Ziegfield Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press);
Susan A. Glenn (2000) Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Harvard: Harvard University Press);
Mark Hodin (2000) ‘The Disavowal of Ethnicity: Legitimate Theatre and the Social Construction of Literary Value in Turn-of-the-Century America’ Theatre Journal 52, 211–226. See also in Theatre Magazine [TM]:
Archie Bell (1907) ‘What Woman Has Done for the Stage’ August, 216–217;
Julia Wemple (1904) ‘Confessions of a Stage-Struck Girl’ April, 103–106; (1911) ‘America: the Melting Pot of the Stars’ Nov, 163–164; (1912) ‘Arabs on the American Stage’ May, 169, x; Augusta da Bonna (1904) ‘The Negro on the Stage’ April, 96–98; ‘Race Suicide on the American Stage’ March, 69–70.
Richard Foulkes (2002) Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Lewis Strang (1902) Famous Actresses of the Day in America (Boston: L.C. Page), pp. 300–302, cited in LeVay Margaret Anglin, 53.
Margaret Anglin (1917) ‘My Career’ EWW, February, 6.
Warren Wilmer Brown (1912) ‘A Veteran Dramatist on Play Making: Henry Arthur Jones’ TM January, 133, 136.
John M. MacKenzie (1986) (ed.) Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Ibid., 134, 310. Cecilia Morgan (2004) ‘Staging Empire, Nation, and Gender: Catherine Nina Merritt and Imperial Pageantry, Southern Ontario, 1890s–1910s’ paper presented to Canadian Historical Association annual conference, Winnipeg.
Linda Gordon (1999) The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Harvard: Harvard University Press).
Angela Woollacott (1997) “All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself”: Australian Women’s Voyages “Home” and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness’ American Historical Review 102, October, 1003–1029.
Jo Burr Margadant (ed.) (2000) The New Biography: Performing Femininity in 19th-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 3.
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© 2010 Cecilia Morgan
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Morgan, C. (2010). ‘That will allow me to be my own woman’: Margaret Anglin, Modernity and Transnational Stages, 1890s–1940s. In: Deacon, D., Russell, P., Woollacott, A. (eds) Transnational Lives. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_12
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