“Miss Anderson has the true sense of rhythm and the clearest enunciation; she has a deep and musical voice, which in moments of pathos thrills with a sweet and tender inflection.  She has seized, in this instance, upon the touching rather than the harmonious side of Galatea, the pure and innocent girl who is not fit to live upon this world.  She is only not human because she is superior to human folly; she cannot understand sin because it is so sweet; she asks to be taught a fault; but the womanly love and devotion, and unselfishness, are all there, writ in clear and uncompromising characters.  The first and last acts were decidedly the best; in the latter especially Miss Anderson touched a true pathetic chord, and fairly elicited the pity and sympathy of the audience.  With a gentle wonder and true dignity she meets the gradual dropping away of her illusion, the crumbling of her unreasoning faith, the cruel stings when her spiritual nature is misunderstood, and her actions misinterpreted.  She is jarred by the rough contact of commonplace facts, and ruffled and wounded by the strange and cynical indifference to her sufferings of the man she loves.  At last when she can bear no more, yet uncomplaining to the last, like a flower broken on its stem, shrinking and sensitive, she totters out with one loud cry of woe, the expression of her agony.  Miss Anderson is a poet, she brings everything to the level of her own refined and artistic sensibility, and the result is that while she presents us with a picture of ideal womanhood, she must appeal of necessity rather to our imaginations than to our senses, and may by some persons be considered cold.  Once or twice she dropped her voice so as to became almost inaudible, and occasionally forced her low tones more than was quite agreeable; but whether in speech, in gesture, or in delicate suggestive byplay, her performance is essentially finished.  One or two little actions may be noted, such as the instinctive recoil of alarmed modesty when Pygmalion blames her for saying ‘things that others would reprove,’ or her expression of troubled wonder to find that it is ’possible to say one thing and mean another.’”

Daily Telegraph, 10th December, 1883.

“‘PYGMALION AND GALATEA.’

“It is the fashion to judge of Miss Anderson outside her capacity and competency as an actress.  Ungraciously enough she is regarded and reviewed as the thing of beauty that is a joy forever, and her infatuated admirers view her first as a picture, last as an artist.  If, then, public taste was agitated by the Parthenia who lolled in her mother’s lap and twisted flower garlands at the feet of her noble savage Ingomar; if society fluttered with excitement at the sight of the faultless Pauline gazing into the fire on the eve of her ill-fated marriage, how much more jubilation there will be now that Miss Mary Anderson, a lovely woman in studied drapery, stands posed at once as a statue, and as a subject for the