Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes:

But few subjects can have had more incarnations than Kemble – ‘did any one else,’ James inquired, ‘ever produce a first fiction at eighty?’ – and Deirdre David’s new biography is particularly alert to this long exercise in self-fashioning, while she divides her attention more evenly over the full range of Kemble’s achievements than her recent predecessors. Though she subtitles her book ‘A Performed Life’, the performances she addresses are as apt to occur offstage as on; and even her subject’s voluminous writings are primarily read as performative gestures.

(LRB 22 May 2008)

Pennsylvania | hardback 347 pp. |ISBN: 9780812240238