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Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: Chelsea Phillips, "Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800" (U of Delaware Press, 2022)
Description: The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800 (University of Delaware Press, 2022) uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and...