Come to Dazzle: Sarah Bernhardt's Australian Tour
Australian History Cultural History Biography Illustrated Non-Fiction 19th-Century History Theatre History Performance Studies
Come to Dazzle: Sarah Bernhardt’s Australian Tour is the only full-length account of the legendary French tragedienne’s 1891 visit to the colonies, a tour that electrified audiences from Melbourne’s Theatre Royal to the gold-rush towns of Kalgoorlie. First-edition hardback, 372 richly illustrated pages, published in 1998 by Currency Press—this is the scarce collector’s copy that theatre historians and Bernhardt aficionados actively hunt for. Corille Fraser draws on rare newspaper files, playbills, hotel ledgers and never-before-published photographs to reconstruct how the 46-year-old superstar crossed the globe with a coffin-shaped steamer trunk, a pet crocodile and a determination to prove that “the divine Sarah” could conquer the Southern Hemisphere.
Between July and November 1891 Bernhardt played 65 performances of seven different plays, spoke to packed houses of 3 000 miners, charmed hostile critics and left Australia £15 000 richer. Fraser shows how the tour rewrote Australian cultural history: local actors adopted Bernhardt’s naturalistic acting style, managers built new theatres to accommodate the demand she created, and colonial fashion houses sold “Bernhardt bustles” by the thousand. The book’s 170 mm × 243 mm landscape format lets the 140 period photographs and full-colour posters breathe, making it as much a visual feast as a scholarly text.
For collectors, this first-edition hardcover is the holy grail: heavy 950 g cloth binding, pristine dust jacket, all pages tight and unmarked, from a smoke-free home—far superior to the later softcover reprint that omits 30 images. Whether you’re researching 19th-century performance history, building a theatre reference library, or hunting a gift that will make a drama teacher gasp, Come to Dazzle delivers star-power on every page. Keywords: Sarah Bernhardt Australia tour book, first edition theatre history, Currency Press Come to Dazzle, illustrated biography Bernhardt, Australian stage 1891.
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