Looking back over her long professional life as a Shakespearean actress, Ellen Terry regretted that she had never played the part of Rosalind, a character she described as ‘high-spirited’, ‘well-bred’, and ‘thoughtful’. And while it is true that, during her successful collaboration with Henry Irving, she did not perform the part of Rosalind, she did manage to speak for (and as) Rosalind in her Shakespeare Lectures delivered between 1910 and 1921 in England, the United States, Australia and Canada. These lectures gave her the freedom to speak on behalf of a modern womanhood she could not, in her Lyceum roles, perform, nor in her life fully inhabit. Further, the delivery of Terry's lectures – her conflating of elocutionary skill and theatrical delivery before largely female audiences – dignified women's public speaking at the height of the suffrage campaign, when women were mounting public platforms by the hundreds to speak on their own behalf. The lectures, that is, not only recorded retrospectively the subtext of Terry's principal Shakespeare roles but modelled women speaking on behalf of women at the threshold of the modern era.