Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives

Edith Craig is at last taken out of the shadows cast by her famous relatives, her mother Ellen Terry and her brother Edward Gordon Craig. As a woman and as a lesbian Edith Craig found that her work in stage and film received uneven critical attention, sometimes ignored, frequently undervalued. Her achievements as an actress, costume designer, stage director and, in her later years, as pageant organizer are assessed here in detail for the first time, fifty years after her death, with new insights from the Edith Craig Archive.

Edith Craig was responsible for numerous firsts on a British stage. With the Pioneer Players society she directed the first production of a play by Hrotsvit, said to be the first female dramatist. Craig's work as a director was praised by contemporaries, such as George Bernard Shaw and Sybil Thorndike and was reviewed in the national and international press.

Craig and her lifelong partners, the artist, Tony (Clare) Atwood and the writer, Christopher St. John (Christabel Marshall), lived together in Bedford Street, Covent Garden and Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent, where their friends in the 1930s included Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge. Edith Craig was often outspoken, unafraid to say and do what she believed in.

Later in her career she became associated with amateur dramatics, community theatres, working nationwide for the Little Theatre movement, the British Drama League and the Women's Ins