Beatrice Brooke Herford (13 October 1867 – 18 July 1952) was an American actress, diseuse and vaudeville performer born in England. Biography The daughter of Dr. Brooke Herford, a Unitarian minister, Herford was born in Salford, Lancashire, and spent her youth moving between England and the United States, following her father's changing jobs, at first in Chicago and then in Boston. Her brother, Oliver Herford, was an artist and humorist. She developed a talent for impersonating characters she encountered, and, in her twenties, she participated avidly in private theatricals, writing her own monologues. In 1895, she made her public debut at the Salle Érard in London, when she was said to be "the first female soloist to write and perform her own monologues as a one-person show", receiving favorable reviews. She made her debut in the U.S. the following year, and in 1897 married Sidney Hayward, of Wayland, Massachusetts. She continued to deliver monologues both in public and in private. Her monologues, generally comic in nature, lampooned popular figures and types. Representative titles are "The Shop Girl" and "The Sociable Seamstress." One reviewer wrote that:Even though she limited her speaking characters to women she appealed equally to men and women. The men probably enjoyed her monologues because they traded on certain stereotyped visions men traditionally held concerning women’s irritating ways. For example she create characters who were dependent on men, who talked incessantly and gossiped excessively, who were scatterbrained and tiresome as well as obnoxious. The women, however, also delighted in her monologues because, according to Herford, they never recognized themselves.In his 1906 book Are you a Bromide, Gelett Burgess uses Herford's monologues as an example of his division of personality types into the quotidian (Bromides) and non-conformist (Sulphitic):Miss Herford's inimitable monologues, being each the apotheosis of some typical Bromide—a shop-girl, a country dressmaker, a bargain-hunter and so on—become, through her art, intensely sulphitic. They are excruciatingly funny, just because she represents types so common that we recognize them instantly. Each expresses the crystallized thought of her particular bromidic group. Done, then, by a person who is herself a Sulphite par excellence, the result is droll. In 1904, Herford and her friends built a small theater on her husband's Wayland property and named it Beatrice Herford's Vokes Theatre, after English actress Rosina Vokes. In 1937, Herford gave use of the theater to a group of actors organized as the Vokes