Wolds Words Festival: The Sellwood Girls, a one-act play in Horncastle.
It will be performed this Saturday, October 9, at the Lion Theatre in Horncastle by the Horncastle Theatre Company.
The performance starts at 6pm, with tickets cost £7 and £6 from Horncastle Music Shop, 01507 526566.
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Set in the early-19th century, the play offers a window into the early lives of Emily, Louisa and Anne Sellwood and their husbands, Alfred and Charles Tennyson, and Charles Weld.
Their stories are characterised by hope and anxiety, love and loss, delight and despair, illness, guilt and reconciliation.
It is a local history lesson in the form of a play, excellently read by the Horncastle Theatre Company.
The cosy Lion Theatre, tucked away behind The Red Lion pub is a stones throw from where the siblings would have danced together in The Assembly Rooms above the Bull Hotel - picture a ballroom scene from Pride and Prejudice and that is what it would have been like.
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The sisters lived in a large house just around the corner on the market square, their father a prominent man in the town; the Tennyson boys would have ridden in from Somersby, 6 miles away. Louisa married Charles first, Emily and Alfred were bridesmaid and best man respectively at their wedding.
Emily and Alfred married 14 years later, the same year he was appointed Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate in 1850.