The publishers provide no information on the price of individual volumes in Part V of this unique series. You can, though, buy Terry along with Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving (or a small carpet) for £295. The editor has divided this volume into five sections, guiding the reader through Terry's career from its beginnings, through her Lyceum partnership with Irving and her stage Jubilee in 1906, to more general assessments and, finally, to some retrospective observations after her death in 1928. Each section is prefaced by Katharine Cockin's usefully contextualizing introduction, and the documents she has selected (essays, reviews, interviews, etc.) are presented as facsimiles of the originals. It is no understatement to say that the reproductions vary in quality. The Era review of Much Ado about Nothing in Glasgow (p. 77) is best read – if read at all – with the aid of a magnifying glass and the publishers (more, perhaps, than the editor) must be embarrassed by the blackened rectangles that pass for photographs on p. 236 and the half-light images that fail to illustrate Austin Brereton's familiarly idolatrous 1897 article in the English Illustrated Magazine.

Loving Ellen Terry was a national pastime for fifty years. Her charm engulfed people. ‘Blow that word charm!’ she said to her ghostwriter Christopher St John, ‘There is something more in my acting than charm’ (p. 256; original in italics). Cockin has chosen a representative selection of ecstatic commentaries like W. Davenport Adams's on her Beatrice: ‘A pen is useless. It is the brush of a Millais that is wanted’ (p. 72). After all, Terry was, by common agreement, ‘the Painter's Actress’ (p. 101) at the high point of pictorial staging, although Henry James was not entirely persuaded: ‘she belongs properly to a period which takes a strong interest in aesthetic furniture, archaeological attire, and blue china’ (p. 42). Where the Blackwood’s reviewer found too much of a ‘coming-on disposition’ in Terry's Portia (p. 61), James specified that she was ‘too osculatory’: ‘The amount of kissing and hugging that goes on in London in the interest of the drama is quite incalculable’ (p. 91). Despite her forays into offstage friendship with him, the fastidious James found Terry too much of a good thing. His observations on her are the best-turned pieces in this volume, which also includes sharply intelligent contributions from William Archer and little-known essays by Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde (a textually alert essay on Shakespeare's valuing of costume and properties). By force of circumstance, perhaps, Cockin has become Ellen Terry's Boswell, but she remains ‘on this side idolatry’, and that adds strength to this volume.