… his wife Eva and to lionize Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole . What has been called ‘the Complicated Temptation of the theatre’ 2 reveals a tension at the heart of her early life between indulging in the pleasures of sociability, albeit … it. This appears in the Thoughts where she stressed that ‘action’ was ‘the life of virtue and the world [… ] the noblest theatre of action.’ ( Thoughts 70) This ambivalence, being ‘in the world’ but not ‘of the world,’ shows her …