ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to Ellen Terry's career on the British stage, examining the relationships she established at work and at home in relation to the influence she exerted, which had far-reaching effects. Terry is one of the most memorable performers on the British stage in the nineteenth century. The significance of Terry's performances was widely valued and debated. She has a significant role in the rise of the theatre as a profession in Britain. This chapter also traces her relationship with melodrama and the Gothic and examines the influence of Stoker's fiction on the work of the Lyceum Theatre. The celebrity of Terry in the world of the nineteenth-century theatre may to some extent have obscured some of the more contradictory and apparently modern aspects of her approach to her work and her life. She is familiar to many in the mind's eye, even when her name or specific achievements remains on the tip of the tongue.
