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HAMER, DIANE

Across an Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time

by Julia Markus

Knopf. 331 pages, $27.95

IN her day, Charlotte Cushman was probably bigger than Madonna or Britney Spears is today. She was an international acting sensation, known for her acting ability as well as her cross-dressing theatrical roles like Hamlet and Romeo. She was not a "one-hit wonder": her longevity as a popular star lasted over 25 years. During her farewell tour, thousands of people escorted her from a New York theater to her hotel. She lived at various times in the U.S. and England, but for most of the year she lived in Rome, in a community of women most of whom were lesbian artists, including Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, and her longtime spouse, Emma Stebbins.

Totally deserving of a full-length biography (even one imbued with a modern lesbian-feminist perspective), Cushman has been neglected until recently. In the last year, two books have been published that take a thorough look at the phenomenon that was Charlotte Cushman: Lisa Merrill's biography, When Romeo Was a Woman; and Julia Markus's Across an Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time. The Merrill book is a wonderful addition to the catalog, with its specificity of looking at Cushman "By focusing on a particular aspect of Charlotte Cushman-her performance of gender and sexuality and the ways that performance was received." Julia Markus's book, however, does not do justice to its primary subject.

Across an Untried Sea begins in 1852 when Cushman was 36 years old and already a famous actress. Consequently, Markus has to fill in Cushman's family and career history with flashbacks. She does this rather awkwardly, trying to fill in gaps through something like word association. When she reaches a person or place in the course of her discussion, she goes off on tangents to place them in context. What comes as a real shock, however, is the eruption of an entire section on Jane Carlyle in the middle of the book. As promised in her subtitle, Markus is apparently trying to give some exposure to the "Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time," and to do so by connecting the lives of these women, as though they were all one happy group of friends. But Cushman met Carlyle only a handful of times and stayed in touch with her only through letters.

Cushman made her life with Emma Stebbins, an accomplished sculptor, but had many other distractions on the side, some of them probably physical, some not. When she was 41, she met the nineteen-year-old Emma Crow, who became the passion of her life. Emma, a daughter of a wealthy businessman and Cushman's financial advisor, was also the sister of one of Harriet Hosmer's lifelong friends. Emma fell in love with Cushman immediately after seeing her onstage, something that often happened to Cushman. After some finagling, Cushman arranged to have Emma marry her nephew Ned, and did her best to keep them as close to her as possible, even securing for her nephew a political position in Rome. When Emma had children, Cushman saw them as "their" children.

Between the facts of Markus's book, which is written in a stiff yet theatrical style, are paragraphs that make little sense from one to the next, as if the book had been written on index cards that got shuffled before they were typed up. For instance, in writing about Charlotte and Emma's first weeks together, Markus writes: "She told the girl she released a mixture of sensations in her at an age when such pleasure was rare. Like Cupid's arrow released on so many a Roman wall and frescoed ceiling, this hit was entirely unexpected." This is followed by a new paragraph: "'Do you really love me? How funny!' Emma wrote. Charlotte would have none of that."

The book's biggest surprise, however, is that Markus never uses the word "lesbian," which does not appear in the index. Instead, she refers to women as eternal friends, companions, spouses, and even lovers (a term the women themselves used). Markus cites Lillian Faderman's research at one point, disparaging her for ignoring the sexual elements of Cushman and Stebbins's relationship. But neither does Markus give it much weight: "Certainly the quick marriage between the 'sculptrice' who had been so fleetingly Hattie's wife was not as sexually charged a relationship as it was an emotionally charged one for Miss Stebbins and a psychologically charged one for Charlotte. ...[T]hey were married--with as much or as little sex as that institution implies."

If this book had truly been about an aggregate group of women, there would have been much less emphasis on Cushman. Even Harriet Hosmer, whose picture appears on the cover of the book and who lived in Cushman's house, is given short shrift. She is used mostly as a device with which to compare and contrast Charlotte herself--how their childhoods differed, how they carried on with their girlfriends, and so on. There are very good biographies in print about Hosmer, but both Cushman and Hosmer still lack a comprehensive biography that looks at their whole lives with a contemporary eye. Markus tried hard with this book, but unfortunately has missed the mark.