In this world and the next

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.” SARAH SIDDONS (1755 - 1831)

PART THREE: An obvious conclusion

 Sarah Siddons as Zara in Congreve's tragedy 'The Mourning Bride', engraving by after painting by Thomas Lawrence, 1783. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum. This is the face of a determined, passionate, brave, intelligent individual, transcending gender. "Independence I will ever secure..." Mary Wollstonecraft.
"...she did look so beautiful! It is a part I like to see her act extremely." Sally Siddons, writing in a letter on February 8th, 1799, about her mother as Zara. 

Sarah Siddons was socially acquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft and only four years older. Temperamentally, the reserved actress, who regulated her emotions and the impulsive, radical feminist, who acted on her desires, were far apart. Siddons did not see herself as a rebel other than in being an actor, which, in the glory days, before it was confused with showing-off, was a form of rebellion in itself.

She craved social acceptance, for herself and her children. She was more interested in improving her life through her art than suffering for it. In private, this passionate artist was conventional, religious and moral. She never compromised her right to have a career, children and a husband, and she earned it all herself.


Frequently when Wollstonecraft wrote about an emancipated woman, independent of men and men's money, she unintentionally described Siddons: “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.”


“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.”  Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the words; you can hear Sarah Siddons saying them.

The great revolutionary Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs Godwin, strong and feminine while wearing a man's hat, by John Chapman, after Unknown artist, stipple engraving, published 1798 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Wollstonecraft's "Vindication" of the Rights of Woman and her other moral "Strictures" combined with her free love affairs were condemned as the "masculine" aberration of a virago, even a madwoman; the respectable actress's  interpretations of women driven by passion, whether it was from ambition or love, were universally admired. 

Siddons' own perceived masculine attributes of imposing height and strength were exalted in serious portraiture, by Lawrence, and treated almost respectfully in caricature by Gillray. She excelled in pleading justice for women with her own mix of power and pathos: "...my drops of tears / I'll turn to sparks of fire." (Queen Katharine in Henry VIII)

The Court for the Trial of Queen Katherine by George Henry Harlow, showing Mrs Siddons as Henry VIII's wronged and defiant first wife, the Shakespearean role she told Dr Johnson she preferred above all others, because it was so "natural". Image: Wikipedia

Sarah Siddons was the main breadwinner for her family, her star earnings far exceeding her husband’s. Her right to pursue her career in this pre-Victorian era was never disputed. He had been a touring actor, a rackety livelihood, without social status; it was her success and dedication which provided their children with middle-class comforts and security. Her friends and biographers did not rate him highly as a person or an actor, but it can't have been easy being Mr Sarah Siddons. 

The marriage started that had started as a passionate love match unravelled in domestic disharmony, until they separated in 1804; their daughter Sally's death seems to have been a trigger. He was a mordant critic of other people's acting, particularly his wife's; nowadays, he would be a director.

William Siddons by John Opie © Tate Gallery London. A strong featured and vivid actor's face, with a handsome, sensual mouth and tell tale weakness in the expression, reveals the vestiges of the man with whom young Sarah Kemble had fallen passionately in love. They separated in 1804 after thirty years of marriage, his own career and public identity having been entirely eclipsed by hers; she was too grand for him, he said.

She had always carried on working during her many pregnancies; neither she nor her audiences expected her to be confined. They were moved by the maternal majesty she lent Lady Macbeth, they suspended disbelief when she played boyish Rosalind in As You Like It, even the virgin Isabella in Measure for Measure. Part of her appeal was as a fecund and resilient mother-goddess; people only lost faith in her when she was past child-bearing age.


She was one of those inspirational career women who do not want to share power with anyone else of her sex. She gave herself wholeheartedly to friendship, but her character was entirely unsuited to competition. Mrs Siddons did not brook rival actresses. 

She was a devoted sister and mother, and one of those inspirational career women who do not want to share power with anyone else of her sex. She gave herself wholeheartedly in friendship, but her upright, uncompromising character was entirely unsuited to competition. Mrs Siddons did not brook rival actresses. She was spared professional jealousy within her family, because her younger sisters were considered too vocally similar to her to be cast in London at the same time; any more Kemble nepotism would have made them unpopular. One of them, Elizabeth Whitlock, had to go to America to enjoy her greatest career successes as a tragedienne; when in England, she kept to a touring circuit well away from her sister.

Like many vocational actors, Sarah Siddons had an ambivalent attitude towards the profession, one which possesses you whether it's good for you or not. Though her husband and all of the Kemble family - the indefatigable touring parents, the sisters and the brothers, one of her nieces - were on the stage, Mrs Siddons seems to have discouraged her daughters from emulating her. It spared them odious comparisons, and the theatre world from being completely overrun by a dynasty, in which, by natural selection, some members were more talented than others.


Mrs Siddons' financial independence was rare enough for a working woman of her times, and especially for an actress. She had tasted humiliating failure at the beginning of her career, and knew as well as any actor that the stage was a cruelly unjust profession, where no-one felt secure, particularly women.

Actresses were damned if they failed, damned if they succeeded. However talented and dedicated to their careers they were, there were some who felt they could only escape the abyss by becoming the mistresses of rich men, aristocrats, or royal princes, though that offered only short-term security while beauty and good luck lasted. Mrs Siddons was not the first virtuous actress, but she was the most famous, and her personal life proved that acting could be pursued as a serious artistic profession, no longer synonymous with prostitution in the public's mind.
Mrs Siddons' financial independence was rare enough for a working woman of her times, especially for an actress. She had tasted humiliating failure at the beginning of her career, and knew as well as any actor that the stage was a cruelly unjust profession, where no-one felt secure, particularly women. 

Actresses were damned if they failed, damned if they succeeded. However talented and dedicated to their careers they were, there were some who felt they could only escape the abyss by becoming the mistresses of rich men, aristocrats, or royal princes, though that offered only short-term security while beauty and good luck lasted. Mrs Siddons was not the first virtuous actress, but she was the most famous, and her personal life proved that acting could be pursued as a serious artistic profession, no longer synonymous with prostitution in the public's mind.

Dorothy Jordan, the brilliantly natural comedienne who had the best pair of legs seen in breeches parts at Drury Lane since Nell Gwynn's, was the only contemporary actress whose popularity and earnings approached Siddons' own. They were the perfect antithesis, light and dark, the one irrepressibly spontaneous, the other regally studied, shining in a mutually advantageous binary system. The comic and tragic muses occupied their respective niches, blocking the advance of any other talented actresses.

We rarely learn more from history than that there is nothing new under the sun.

 Dorothy Jordan as Viola in 'Twelfth Night' by Unknown artist, hand-coloured line engraving, late 18th century © National Portrait Gallery, London

Mrs Jordan often financially supported her lover and father of ten of her children, the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, during their twenty years of domestic life together - people joked that she kept him, not the other way round. After he abandoned her on his hunt for a rich wife, and respectability, she died in exile, virtually destitute, denied access to her children, victim of Hanoverian hypocrisy and negligence of duty which would have been unconscionable to the great royal lover of actresses, Charles II. 

Like Sarah Siddons, acting was her calling, not just a means of earning money; it was an essential urge of her personality, the only way she could be completely herself and completely happy. Delight bubbled out of her on stage, as sombre passion emanated from Mrs Siddons.

Mrs Siddons with the Emblems of Tragedy
by Sir William Beechey
oil on canvas, 1793
© National Portrait Gallery, London

NOT CONCLUDED