Actress, producer, and playwright.
Isabel Handley was educated at Punt-road State School (at an exhibition at which she was judged to be about six years old in 1895) and Church of England Girls' Grammar School, from which she will have graduated c. 1909. (Her name appears in the Upper IV class lists in 1907, giving her two remaining years of schooling.) Her sister Kathleen was about two years her senior, in the Extra IV at Church of England Girls' Grammar when Isobel was in the Upper II.
The earliest of her stage roles to be traced so far was in a performance of J.M. Barrie's Alice, Sit by the Fire with the University Dramatic Club in 1911 (see advertisements in the Argus, 3 May 1911, p.16), but her name also appears in the cast lists for repertory productions in 1911.
By 1917, Isabel, her sister Kathleen, and a Miss Allie Robson—all of whom were associated with the Melbourne Repertory Theatre—had settled in a flat together in New York, taking with them letters of introduction. Isabel was back in Australia by the mid-1920s at the latest.
She was undertaking significant roles at Melbourne's Repertory Theatre as early as 1916, and was producing plays for them as early as 1924 (when she was a co-producer for Galsworthy's Loyalties).
In the late 1920s, she was involved with Elizabeth Apperly in the Playwriter Theatre, a repertory company devoted to producing works by Australian playwrights (and with a heavy concentration on women writers): many of Handley's plays from this period were written for the Playwriter Theatre.
Her work ceases to be mentioned in newspapers by about 1939, and nothing has so far been traced of her work or life after that date.
Manuscripts for some of her works are held in the Campbell Howard Collection at the University of New England.
Sources include:
'Punt-road State School', The Prahran Telegraph, 30 November 1895, p.4.
'School Speech Days: Chuch of England Girls' Grammar School', The Argus, 22 December 1903, p.7.
'The Social Circle', The Herald, 26 June 1917, p.4.
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