About the Author
Tana Wojczuk is an editor at Guernica and teaches at New York University, where she has been a Global Research Initiative fellow. She has written for the New York Times, Tin House, BOMB, The Believer, Vice, and elsewhere. Wojczuk holds an MFA from Columbia University. She was a finalist for the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction and a poetry fellow at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
AvidReaderPress.com
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Tana-Wojczuk
@avidreaderpress @avidreaderpress @avidreaderpress
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
Notes on Sources
The Charlotte Cushman papers in the Library of Congress contain thousands of letters and many of Cushman’s personal scrapbooks; even bad notices were preserved with care. That these letters survive is remarkable. Cushman, like many nineteenth-century luminaries, preferred to keep her public and private lives separate and consigned most of her personal correspondence to the fire. But her lover of many years and later daughter-in-law, Emma Crow, ignored Cushman’s repeated requests to “burn this letter.” It is thanks to Crow’s loving rebellion that we have this wealth of material on one of the greatest American actresses. This period is explored in detail in Lisa Merrill’s book When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators. Thank you in particular to Walter Zvonchenko at the Library of Congress. The work of Lawrence Levine was especially transformative, as was the work of Bruce McConachie.
Materials that speak to Cushman as an artist—her goals, methods, the high and low points of her career, what she meant to her audiences—are scattered across the country and across the globe. The Folger Shakespeare Library houses several of Cushman’s original playbills, as well as letters and reviews that help establish her as a prime mover in America’s love affair with Shakespeare. The Houghton Theatre Library at Harvard was essential in reconstructing Cushman’s nineteenth-century context. Their archives also hold letters to Cushman from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about a play he wanted to write for her, and theatrical ephemera including the “Macready dagger.” Smithsonian curator Kenneth Cohen’s article “The Woman Who Would Be Cardinal” alerted me to the existence of several of Cushman’s original costumes in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. These costumes, one of which was once preserved in arsenic, gave me a valuable glimpse of Cushman onstage. The Annie Fields papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harriet Hosmer papers at the Schlesinger Library helped illuminate Cushman’s friendships with other women artists.
Columbia University’s rare books and manuscripts division at Butler Library preserves Cushman’s only extant diary, a tiny, pocket-size journal bound in red leather. The Morgan Library archives contain correspondence between Charles Dickens and William Macready about Cushman. The Thomas Sully journals at the New York Public Library rare books and manuscripts division helped fill in details about Cushman’s life with Rosalie Sully’s family.
The New England Historical society kindly provided copies of their Cushman letters as did the National Library of Scotland. The New York Historical Society houses letters from Cushman’s early years, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is a treasure trove of material on New York theatre and contains reviews of Cushman’s roles not found elsewhere. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle digital archives were useful in locating Walt Whitman’s early reviews of Cushman. The Seward House Museum generously shared material about Cushman found in Fanny Seward’s diary. Jessy Randall at Colorado College was a great help in pointing me to and sharing the papers of Helen Hunt Jackson and the many letters between Jackson and Cushman in the archive.
In New Orleans, I discovered that the site of the St. Charles Theatre is now a Marriott, but maps of nineteenth-century New Orleans digitized by the Louisiana Historical Society made it possible to piece together the city as Cushman knew it. In Boston, Cushman’s residences no longer stand, but you can find tours that will lead you through her old stomping grounds. In New York, the Bowery and Park Theatres are long gone, but the lively theatrical culture they inspired remains. A fellowship from New York University’s Global Research Initiative supported research in Italy, which filled in important details about the female artist colony Cushman helped create in Rome.
prologue
“She is the rage”: George C. Foster, New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches (California: University of California Press, 1990), 151.
An enormous crystal chandelier: The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, Eds. Don B. Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
“American Queen of Tragedy”: “Charlotte Cushman,” New York Herald, November 21, 1874.
“Shakespeare!”: Richard Henry Stoddard, The Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library, 2005), 405.
“our Charlotte”: Foster, New York By Gaslight, 149.
“I was, by a press of circumstances”: William Thompson Price, A Life of Charlotte Cushman (New York: Brentano’s, 1894), 169.
“take me quickly at any moment”: Clara Erskine Clement Waters, Charlotte Cushman (Boston, Massachusetts: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 105.
“rockets set up all the way”: Emma Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston, Massachusetts: James R. Osgood and Company, 1879), 265.
“What is
