Like a star shooting across the sky, Peg’s existence was glittering, but all too brief. Having suffered a collapse on-stage while playing Rosalind in As You Like It, she died a few years later, in 1760, while still in her mid-forties. History remembers her as an ’18th-century Nell Gwyn’, but this book – the first full-length biography for over half a century – reveals how she drew on the legacy of her predecessor, Anne Oldfield, in order to rebrand herself as a patriotic icon. Drawing on legal documents and other archival materials, it also highlights her determination to succeed in a man’s world.

Since her death, Peg has been immortalised in plays, novels, visual art, cinema, music, even cookery. This book is unique in considering the myth as well as the life. It unites material from archives in England, Ireland and the United States, including documents thought to have been lost in the 1922 bombing of Dublin’s Public Record Office. I’m also the first of Peg’s biographers to draw on The London Stage and A Biographical Dictionary of Actors: two landmarks of American scholarship which reveal new lines of enquiry about her career.