More than a Woman: Early Memoirs of British Actresses

Abstract

The early decades of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of fiction that frequently took women’s defence of chastity as its subject. In contrast, the first biographies of Restoration and eighteenth-century actresses were not simply moral warnings that chastised women players for loose behavior, but instead offered entertaining accounts of female adventurers who managed to align some semblance of “virtue” with transgressive sexual mores and lowly family origins. I focus on the lives of three celebrated actresses, Nell Gwyn, Lavinia Fenton, and Anne Oldfield to show how a generation of English actresses was memorialized, and how their virtue —or lack of it— could be kept remarkably distinct from their sexual histories.