The Murray Edwards Duse Collection
by Anna Sica and Alison Wilson
Mimesis Publishing, 2014; pp. 1-300
The Murray Edwards Duse Collection is the best record of Eleonora Duse’s literary background. The discovery and the reconstruction of The Collection change in many ways the reception of her acting and of her intellectual profile, and shed new light on her art. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection includes several books that Eleonora Duse read, and they still reveal her comments. They are a kind of knowledge-map of the accomplished erudition she promulgated in her acting. Furthermore, the Collection proves that her books are a fundamental resource in understanding the roots of her artistic profile. She herself was fond of pointing out, how the ‘actress’ and the ‘intellectual’ closely (and perhaps indistinguishably) interacted. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection may be considered metaphorically as Duse’s gold.