‘I rode on the stage in such style, that the men in front forgot I was a girl, and also forgot to laugh.’ Emily 1898
Outside of musical circles Emily Soldene is largely forgotten, but in Victorian Britain she was a household name, a celebrity, a slightly risqué star, who had risen from the murky music halls. Helen discovered the irrepressible Miss Soldene whilst researching The Scarlet Sisters. Her Nanna had always said that they were related to a famous actress but knew nothing more. Years later a historian of the ancestral village told Helen to google this racy actress great aunt. With one click she found a photograph of Emily Soldene dressed in silk britches, a low kimono style jacket revealing a fulsome cleavage and thigh, mouth wide in a cheeky smile.
Born the year that Queen Victoria was crowned to an unmarried Clerkenwell milliner, Emily Soldene rose to become a celebrated leading lady in popular operas, a director, and then formidable impresario, and created one of the era’s most celebrated opera companies. She challenges the stereotype of Victorian women and shows just what they could achieve with enough determination.
Her career took her to theatres across the country then America and Australia, before she reinvented herself as a journalist and writer. For the rest of her life she wrote a weekly column for the Sydney Evening News, as well as a novel and a memoir, and scandalised the capital with her revelations. Emily was unique for a working-class woman, in that she had a public voice and was free to give her opinions on everything from Churchill to the suffragettes, the advent of the motor car, the death of Queen Victoria and women wearing trousers.
A darling of London’s music halls and theatre land, Emily counted Charles Dickens and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as friends and mingled with the Rothschilds, Oscar Wilde and aristocrats. Charting her international triumphs and calamitous disasters, from taking Broadway by storm, to befriending cowboys in the Wild West and touring the Australian outback in a Cobbs coach, Helen vividly recreates the era and a riotous life that has faded from the limelight.
Emily also had a half sister, Clara Vesey, who followed Emily on to the stage and became the most photographed actress of the 1870’s. Eleven and a half years younger than Emily, she was rarely allowed to play the lead roles despite being prettier and supposedly a better singer. The sisters were best friends but also rivals, and their different life choices and then the choices of their daughters, say something not just about the sisters themselves, but women in the nineteenth century and perhaps even women today.
Putting Emily Soldene firmly back centre stage, The Improbable Adventures of Miss Emily Soldene is a portrait of an irrepressible character who trod the boards, travelled the globe and tore up the Victorian rule book.