ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN advances Not surprisingly, she wondered if her suffering was worthwhile: Would it have been better for me if I had married—anyone— married, and been happy in a quiet home? But no; I should have been tormented by the abiding sense of having missed my true vocation I always felt I could not be happy in the life which suited my sisters I fear I have too much of the combative element in me, ever to be satisfied with a quiet domestic sphere.8 Like many aspirants, she contemplated a stage career in the context of other female options Like many from affluent homes, she crossed the boundaries of class at the expense of eternal expulsion from her natural sphere, then unceasingly sought genteel companions in her adopted sphere Yet unlike Helen Taylor, this woman asserts that an artistic life gives sufficient compensation for the hardship, isolation, and sexual skirmishes Flora Mayor, the daughter of an Anglican divine who held successive chairs of Classics and Moral Philosophy at the University of London, chose to try the stage after she took a degree at Newnham College, Cambridge Her father’s objection was spiritual and moral, while her mother (who flung Flora’s professional photographs across the room) rejected the project on the grounds of snobbery Toward the end of 1902, Flora consented to join her first provincial tour, a step she had resisted for six years because she thought that touring was more de-classed than brief stints in third-rate residential companies Her sister wrote: ‘I think your life sounds so detestable, it makes me quite depressed to think of you being on an equality with these beastly people…how can you stand it.’9 Ultimately, Flora could not stand it Her intellectuality put off the managers, and the squalor and incessant self-denegration of the trooper’s life put off Mayor Nevertheless, like Helen Taylor forty years earlier, she had the courage to try the experiment and the financial and familial cushion to abandon it She retired in expectation of marriage, but after her fiancé’s premature death she settled for being her brother’s housekeeper, and made a small name for herself as an author For middle-class actresses who took to the stage following a reversal in family fortunes (that mainstay of Victorian fictional plots) the choice of career was usually calculated according to the monetary, rather than artistic, returns that were expected In The Actress of the 74