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By Root 1402 0

theatrical families, and most began on the provincial stage or as dancers. Quick, clear, and sweet speech was more important than beauty, and Emma's voice was raw and untrained. She had no patron to smooth the way by bribing theater owners or supplying her with contacts and clothes. Most aspiring actresses ended up working as waitresses, barmaids, or prostitutes. Emma did have one advantage over the others: she could read. She also had spirit, vital in the rough and competitive world of the theater, as well as sturdy health, experience in service, freedom from parental control (no concerned mother would allow a thirteen-year-old to serve as an actress's assistant), and youth (her salary would be very low). Emma was probably removed from the audition line and put to work as maid to Mrs. Linley, the wardrobe mistress.

Drury Lane, on the site of the modern-day theater, was big business. Only one other theater—Covent Garden—could stage full plays, and since London had only one opera house and no other regular theater for ballet, comedy, musicals, or indeed any type of entertainment, over two thousand eager patrons crammed into Drury Lane every night. In the season of 1778-79, when Emma arrived, her new home employed 46 actors, 32 actresses, 13 dancers, and 6 singers, as well as a full orchestra and about 150 support staff: seamstresses, hairdressers, carpenters, painters, animal handlers, chorus masters, and choreographers, along with temporary painters and workmen when needed. The yearly profits often hit over £6,000, once the costs of around £40,000 had been paid. The architect Robert Adam had renovated the building in the 1770s by adding a graceful classical façade and decorating the walls in sumptuous gold leaf, while improving the stage lighting. Beneath the graceful, gilded ceilings were terrible rivalries and factions. Emma had arrived at a theater in crisis.

In 1776, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, at the age of twenty-five, bought a half share in the theater from its actor-manager, David Garrick. A brilliant playwright, Sheridan was an incompetent manager. Playwrights claimed he never answered their letters, and he forgot to pay his employees. Most of the time, as the actress Kitty Clive wrote, “everyone is raving against Mr. Sheridan.” He appointed his family to the plum positions. His pompous father became artistic director, and he made his father-in-law, Thomas Linley, musical director, putting his mother-in-law, Mary Linley, in charge of costumes and props. Infuriated by their autocratic and inexperienced new managers, performers defected to Covent Garden and provincial theaters. The servants also left, and so, as Emma found, there were new jobs on offer.

Mary Linley was forty-three. Four of her twelve children had died in infancy, and her husband, Thomas, set the remaining eight to work singing at public recitals. Crowds admired their eldest daughter, beautiful, talented Eliza, while they mocked her greedy parents. In his hit play of 1771, The Maid of Bath, Samuel Foote poked fun at how Mary had tried to force seventeen-year-old Eliza to marry a widower of sixty, a disaster averted only when Sheridan whisked the teenager to France and later married her. Initially, Mary flourished as her son-in-law's wardrobe mistress. By the time Emma arrived, she was wilting, mourning Thomas, her eldest son and favorite musician, who had drowned in a boating accident in August. She was also concerned over her daughter. Now retired from singing, Eliza was only twenty-one but weak from bouts of tuberculosis and a series of miscarriages. Her father told her husband that if he touched her, it was a "nail in her coffin," and Sheridan left her to pine in their house in Great Queen Street. By the time Emma arrived, he was besotted with the beautiful actress Mary Robinson, known as Perdita. Grieving for Thomas and angry to see her daughter humiliated by her husband's infidelities, Mrs. Linley was embittered and almost impossible to please.

No needlewoman, Emma was Mary's errand girl. Since the stock dresses were shabby, there was vicious