Emily Soldene - Actress, writer, rebel

As the darling of London’s opera scene, and then as a journalist printing scandalous revelations about the cream of society, Emily Soldene thrived in the limelight. HELEN BATTEN explains why this trendsetting, rule-breaking, genre-hopping Victorian celebrity deserves to take centre stage once more

- By Helen Batten. Photographs by Rachael Dickens, Getty Images, Alamy, Bridgeman, Christian Jungeblodt

Emily Solden started her improbably varied career in the music halls, where she became a leading lady, producer, director, and impresario. She circled the globe many times, conquering Broadway, touring the Wild West, and sailing to Australia and New Zealand. But it was her final reinvention – as a writer – that is perhaps her most heroic. When the theatrical world turned its back on her, Soldene kick-started her career once more, publishing two books and becoming a successful journalist. She had that rare thing for a Victorian working-class woman: a public voice, which she used to speak fearlessly about issues such as adultery and abortion. Though she despised the suffragette movement, she was the living embodiment of practical feminism that would seem remarkable even decades later.

It was sheer envy that first propelled Soldene onto the stage. Born in 1838 to a bonnet maker in Clerkenwell, London, by her early twenties she found herself married with two young children, living in her mother’s cramped lodgings and with the threat of the workhouse always looming. Having read a glowing review of the Italian opera singer Adelina Patti, the very next day Soldene spied a poster of Patti – with a chin that was “very long and underhung”, as she described it – and marched straight to the house of a singing instructor.

Soldene, it quickly became apparent, boasted an uncommon ability to convey emotion through her singing. Her first reviews were good but she struggled to find paid work, so turned to the music halls. Women who worked in these dens of drinking, sex work and lewd humour had terrible reputations. For Soldene, though, they offered her the chance to escape a life of drab domesticity. Adopting the stage name Miss FitzHenry, she started work at the Oxford Music Hall in Westminster, where she became an instant hit singing tragic ballads.