ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the significance of friendships and solidarity among celebrated women performers and writers through an examination of a selection of diaries, letters, biographies and autobiographies belonging to middle-class women who attended and watched performances on stage and then on the silver screen in Italy from the 1870s onwards. It argues that as portents of modernity and intermediaries for women spectators, fans, and readers, female performers’ and women writers’ relationships were based on admiration and solidarity; and that these extended from them, to spectators, and back to performers, thereby constructing a continuous positive feedback loop. A female affective, critical community – an “affective alliance,” to draw again on Grossberg – by and for women, was in the process of taking shape for a growing middle class that was becoming more educated and literate as the century drew to a close, and a new one was beginning.
