Absent Voices: Resurfacing Walter Bentley’s Leading Ladies (May Brookyn, Florence Grant, Minnie Brandon and Melba Watt) in the late-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the late-Victorian period, power on the stage largely rested on the shoulders of leading men, “stars” imported to Australasia from Britain or America. Challenges experienced by Victorian actresses have been addressed by a number of scholars, including Tracy Davis in her seminal work Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (1991), and on the Australasian stage by Janice Norwood, Veronica Kelly, and more generally by Angela Woollacott.

In this paper, I am using a gendered framework to excavate the stories of the invisible actresses in Australasia, rising to Katherine Newey’s challenge of “making visible women’s lives, work and relationships to power” which she speculates “is an ethical imperative for feminist history” (88). These particular revisionist histories foreground actresses who supported Scottish tragedian Walter Bentley (1849-1927), but who are otherwise absent from theatre history, absences that diminish our understanding of the complexities faced by actresses on the late-nineteenth century stage.

My recuperative feminist histories expose the gendered hierarchy of the stage, providing visibility to a series of second-ranked actresses, Newey’s “almost vanished women” (102). I introduce three actresses to whom Bentley was said to be married and follow some of his leading ladies in Australasia. Ironically, Bentley himself is largely absent from theatre history, being a footnote to a number of studies; his absence has largely sealed the fate of his leading ladies.