Ned's Girl by Bryan Forbes

Ned's Girl

The Life of Edith Evans

by Bryan Forbes

Elm Tree Books, 1977, [First Edition], ISBN 241896002, b/w photographic plates, hardcover, dustjacket

Good Condition, tape residue on front and back covers, sticker residue inside back cover, front flyleaf removed, institute stamp to publishers page, stain to front cover and underside of dustjacket (see photographs) 

'Ned's Girl is the unconventional title Edith Evans herself chose for this biography when she authorised her friend and literary executor Bryan Forbes to write it.  The book - the first full-length account of her life - is a romance in every sense of the word.
It is the story of an extraordinary woman who by her own admission was born "intoxicated" - a 'raving lump of a girl' with no theatrical background who started life as a milliner and was then plucked from obscurity by the great Shakespearean innovator William Poel and plonked down firmly in the centre of the English stage, a position she occupied with consistent distinction for sixty years. 'God,' she once said, 'was very good to me.  he never let me go on tour', which was in fact a slight exaggeration.
Ned was her revered father but, as this brilliant and entertaining biography shows, at the end of her unique career Edith Evans belonged, finally, to posterity and history may well remember her as the greatest English actress of this century.'