Seeing the Big Picture

Hi all. I didn't forget! Just got some nice hangout time with friends this evening and waited to put myself under the time crunch until I got back.

So this week I set a writing challenge for myself: spend 90 minutes on each chapter of my book to remind myself of what the project looks like as a whole. Another bad habit of mine: losing sight of the forest because ooooh lookie there are so many trees and they are all equally fascinating and oh have you seen this one let me describe each of its leaves in excruciating detail...you get the picture.

Look it's a forest! Pretty trees. Very Chekhov, forest, love what you're doing with all this.

Quick recap: I'm writing a book on actresses in the long eighteenth century (1689-1800 for me) who performed onstage while visibly pregnant. There were a lot of them, and they did the work-life balance thing before we ever thought to call it work-life balance. They weren't unique in this way: women have been doing it for millennia, but there's a particular visibility to this labor as women are attaining celebrity status in this century.

There are six main chapters, one of which (on the complete and utter badass Sarah Siddons), I was already in the process of revising. That left the other five to check in on: the first on economics and the repertory system, which let me revisit and further the writing I'd done while at the Folger; the second on celebrity, very helpful in remembering what I do and do not need to repeat/revisit in later chapters; the third on actresses' social performances of pregnancy and motherhood, which lets me tackle, among other things, life writings (correspondence, biography, memoir).

The next three are concerned with specific individuals: the aforementioned Sarah Siddons, the tremendous and fascinating Dorothy Jordan (the portrait detail at the top of the page is from a painting of her as The Comic Muse by John Hoppner), and three women whose careers haven't received much attention, but who were rough contemporaries of Siddons and Jordan: Sarah Wilson, Jane Lessingham, and Mary Wells. These last three worked at Covent Garden (Siddons and Jordan were at Drury Lane), which has also received the short end of the stick in terms of scholarly attention.

I realize that's a large information dump and you may have stopped reading. That's cool, I'm doing this for me.

Some takeaways: 1) Chapter One has some of the most exciting conclusions in it, but I anticipate I'm going to have some important questions of scale here (level of detail, for example, and the range of questions regarding season planning that can be addressed; some of it may need to be left for more specific examples in later chapters); 2) Chapter Three has often felt the most nebulous to me--what exactly are the limits one sets when aiming to connect the experiences of actresses to their larger social world? Revisiting the chapter helped to ground me in the specific case studies and examples I'll be drawing from to create clearer boundaries around the topic. 3) One of the women in Chapter Six, Mary Wells, provides a great opportunity to dig deeper into the repertory issues I may not have time to explore in Chapter One.

The whole thing is a puzzle, and there are a lot of pieces; this week gave me time to pick up the box and check my work against the image I'm trying to create and the story I'm trying to tell.

My aim is to do this every few weeks--I'll let you know how it goes here.

Next time: a better overview of the topic, I promise. But it felt important to log what I'd done and some of the realizations I had this week here so I don't lose sight of the progress I've made.

As promised (to myself): this is unedited and imperfect.