of London’s largest theaters, Irving rapidly became one of the people to reckon with in his chosen profession.

As Irving began to partner with Terry more frequently on the stage, an offstage relationship developed between them that has somewhat puzzled previous biographers. Given that both were married to people from whom they were separated, and given the legal barriers to divorce at the time, the two could not marry. As a result, they had to be somewhat discreet. The two actors traveled as a couple when touring, and Irving purchased a secluded suburban villa where they could be together in private. However, it was necessary for the sake of appearances to preserve the fiction that they were simply working professionals who happened to act in many of the same productions. Their ability to maintain this illusion of respectability has led some commentators to question whether they ever were in fact lovers, but Holroyd’s analysis of the historical evidence establishes with little doubt that their relationship was a long-lasting one, if subject to variations in interest and intensityon Irving’s part in particular.

Although the two never had a child together, the fate of their various children occupies a substantial portion of A Strange Eventful History, and it is in following these diverse biographical strands that the book begins to lose some of its coherence. Their four children followed very different paths that, except in one case, are of no great intrinsic interest. In attempting to keep their separate stories in play simultaneously, Holroyd necessarily alternates back and forth between somewhat pedestrian narratives in a not entirely successful effort to keep readers’ attention.

The one exceptional tale is provided by Edward Gordon Craig, the flamboyant son of Terry and her lover Edward William Godwin. Craig’s innovations in theatrical design brought him the admiration of luminaries such as Isadora Duncan, Max Reinhardt, and Konstantin Stanislavski. His life was a chaotic one, though, not least because of his penchant for siring children with many of the women who crossed his path and whom he typically exploited as unpaid secretarial help before abandoning them for the next pretty face that caught his fancy. His thoroughgoing selfishness and unwillingness to take responsibility for any of his actions make it hard to care much about him, but Holroyd’s evocative descriptions of Craig’s often stunning theatrical designs establish his importance to the era’s stagecraft.

The same cannot between be said of his sister Edith Craig, who had difficulty freeing herself from her mother’s well-meant but nonetheless smothering influence. Much of the substantial portion of A Strange Eventful History devoted to Edith is monopolized by the idiosyncrasies of the companion of her later years, a woman who chose to socially transgender herself by adopting the name Christopher Marie St. John. Although the text’s resulting glimpses of the rather genteel and necessarily circumspect lesbianism of the period offer some counterpoint to the actively heterosexual lives of Terry and Irving, Holroyd does not succeed in enlivening what seems to have been a long, loyal, and on the whole rather dull relationship.

Irving’s children Laurence and Henry, who died relatively youngat the ages of forty-two and forty-nine, respectivelyfollowed in their father’s footsteps, enjoying successful theatrical careers. They do not play significant parts in the book’s narrative scheme, however. Given the comparative brevity of their lives and the similarity of their professional accomplishments to those of their father, one can understand why Holroyd chose to downplay their roles. However, Holroyd falls instead into repetitive accounts of Edward Gordon Craig’s series of affairs and descriptions of minor conflicts in Edith Craig’s menage. Readers may therefore wish that he had paid more attention to the literally dramatic and less to the private melodramas of Edith Terry’s children.

Holroyd’s most recent biographies have dealt with larger-than-life individuals such as Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, and George Bernard Shaw, whose stories needed no embellishment from relatives, lovers, or friends. Here, however, the somewhat elusive personalities of Terry and Irving, neither of whom seems to have had an inner life that matched the charismatic drama of their public performances, has led Holroyd to surround them with a supporting cast that tends to obscure rather than reveal his subjects. In addition to casting about for extraneous material to enliven his narrative, Holroyd several times resorts to a structural device that one associates with the most primitive forms of melodrama: Ending a chapter with the person he has been talking about in mortal danger, he then leaves readers hanging as he switches to another subject entirely. Although one’s curiosity will eventually be satisfied in a later chapter, this cheap chronological trick has no place in what purports to be a serious treatment of its material.

Fortunately, the main thread of A Strange Eventful History is the exciting and compelling story of Terry, Irving, and the collective and individual achievements of their time on the stage. That story’s appeal is strong enough to keep one persevering through the book’s less gripping sections. Even though the concluding years of their careers were marked by health problems that might have forced less dedicated actors to retire, Terry and Irving fought their way through these difficulties and found ways to compensate for the decline in their physical abilities. Accounts of their performances during this period often refer to a new maturity and subtlety in their acting that impressed audiences anew with their mastery of their art. Although Holroyd spends too much time on other figures in their lives, those lives themselves are worth documenting and compellingly documented in this biography.