So why do we snigger when ladies live together?
On one of those blazing days a few weeks ago, we went to Smallhythe Place in Kent, the home of the great Victorian actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928). She was born into a theatrical family – a bit like Vincent Crummles and his daughter the Infant Phenomenon – and she first trod the boards as Puck in 1856. Not bad going – she was still acting on the stage seven decades later. Smallhythe was a farmhouse when she and the great impresario Sir Henry Irving (‘We were once terribly in love’) found it in the 1890s. It had been a boat-building shed in the reign of Henry V, in the days when Smallhythe was still coastal, and it would have looked out to sea. Now, as you stand in the upstairs room, surrounded by her costumes for legendary performances as Lady Macbeth, you gaze across green meadows and nodding elms. The...
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