Christine Balint: Ophelia's fan

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Turning history into fiction can be a clumsy process, yet this imagining of the life of the 19th century Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson is as graceful and yet as steely as the grande dame herself.

Smithson was born in Ireland in 1800, daughter of impoverished theatre people, and brought up by a Catholic priest. Always destined for the theatrical life of rough magic, though, she eventually made her way to the famous theatre at Drury Lane in London, and then, in 1827, on to Paris with Charles Kemble's acting troupe to introduce Shakespeare to the French. As Ophelia in particular, Smithson found the recognition and financial security that she'd always craved.

Tragedy strikes in the form of love — a Shakespearean irony if ever there was one — when wild Hector Berlioz becomes infatuated with her, using her as the inspiration behind his Symphonie Fantastique, but then manipulating her and casting her aside.

The book is strangely structured, moving back and forwards between Smithson's childhood and her adult trials and successes, and including imaginative chapters whose narrators are some of the characters Smithson made her own: Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia. The childhood scenes are whimsical and unnecessarily oblique, but Smithson as an adult is a wonderful, strong, engaging character, perfectly placed in the theatrical demi-monde to stand slightly outside mainstream society, and yet always threatened by its prejudices and ruthless social structures.

A woman of astonishing sense, courage, intelligence and imagination, she refuses to become the mistress of wealthy admirers, and refuses to have intimacy before marriage, even though Berlioz, rejected, spits at her in disbelief: "But you are an actrice!"

Gently compelling, Balint's Smithson will capture your heart.