Introduction: Framing the Victorian Woman Playwright

Abstract

This book is about the appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of women’s words in the British theatre from the late Romantic period to the beginning of the twentieth century. My principal focus is play-writing for the commercial London theatre, although I also consider the substantial work of women for amateur and home theatricals, women’s work in translating and adapting for the stage, the agitprop theatre of the suffragette movement, and the para-theatrical writing — not quite closet drama, not quite stage success — which characterized dramatic writing by women in the mid- and late-Victorian periods. My aim is to make visible those previously invisible women writers, whose work has been shrouded by a combination of factors: the material practices of the London theatre industry which presented a misogynist obstacle course, Victorian gender ideology which theorized the public nature of the playwright’s task to be unfeminine, a practice of theatre historiography which has consistently converted partisan aesthetic judgements into universal statements of fact, and the scholarly discipline of Victorian Studies which has consistently ignored the theatre as a significant element of nineteenth-century culture.