Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain

Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain is the first book to make a comprehensive study of women playwrights in the British theatre from 1820 to 1918. It looks at how women playwrights negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers, and examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatises the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. The book also includes an extensive Appendix of authors and plays, which will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars in nineteenth-century studies and theatre historians. Hundreds of women writers wrote for the British stage in the nineteenth century, but their works have become invisible in the history of the theatre. In this first full-length study of Victorian women playwrights in Britain, Katherine Newey uncovers these invisible women playwrights, to find an energetic tradition of female playwriting that dramatizes the central experiences of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, marriage and the family. Women playwrights are revealed in all their diversity - ambitious, playful, tragic, comic, popular, hard working - and in their strength of purpose in the face of the masculine, clubbable Victorian theatre. Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain shows that it was possible to be a playwright and a woman in Victorian Britain, and argues that it is important that we remember the women who struggled so hard for recognition on the national stage. Featuring extensive use of archival work and a useful appendix with a checklist of British women playwrights and their plays from 1800 to 1900, this new study will be valuable to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian studies, and gender and performance.

This is a comprehensive study of women playwrights in the British theater from 1820 to 1918. It looks at how they negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers, and examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatizes the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. The book also includes an extensive Appendix of authors and plays.

Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction: Framing the Victorian Woman Playwright....Pages 1-9 Rescuing the Stage....Pages 10-38 Legitimacy....Pages 39-65 Money....Pages 66-109 Art....Pages 110-134 Home and Nation....Pages 135-168 Conclusion: The Playwright as Woman of Letters....Pages 169-189 Back Matter....Pages 190-269 Examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatises the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. This book looks at how women playwrights negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers