Abstract
In a puff for Frances Burney’s historical tragedy Hubert de Vere, the Oracle announced that ‘Miss Burney’s pen will retrieve the Stage, degraded beyond bearing by the tricking trash which our Harlequin Writers have forced upon the Public.’1 In the latter part of her life, Hannah More justified her earlier work as a playwright by the desire to convert ‘the Stage […] into a school of virtue.’2 In 1826, the Theatrical Examiner wrote of Mary Russell Mitford ‘that this lady has in some measure rescued the stage from these moving nuisances, those puning [sic] pirates who infest the purlieus of the theatres, under the assumed name of authors.’3 And about Mitford’s later play, Rienzi (1828), the ubiquitous D.—G. wrote, ‘The reception of this tragedy is a proof that, though the public have been wont to feed on garbage, they have no disinclination to wholesome food.’4
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Notes
Ellen Donkin, Getting Into the Act (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 185.
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: The Ideology of Style in Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Greg Kucich, ‘Reviewing Women in British Romantic Theatre,’ in Catherine Burroughs (ed.), Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49.
See, for example, ‘M. R.’s’ letter to the Times, 27 August 1829. For a brief account of the complex financial arrangements of proprietorship and management at Covent Garden, see Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 260.
Benson Earle Hill, ‘Memoir of the Authoress,’ in Isabel Hill (ed.), Brian the Probationer: or, The Red Hand. A Tragedy in Five Acts (London: W. R. Sams, Royal Library, 1842), 88–9.
Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 3.
Hill, ‘An Indefinite Article,’ Holiday Dreams; or, Light Reading, in Poetry and Prose (London: Thomas Cadell, and Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1829), 4.
Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 61.
Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: Women’s Press, 1978; 1963), 173.
West-Country Wooing was written for Harriet Waylett; for details of Waylett’s career as actress and manager, see J. S. Bratton, ‘Working in the Margin: Women in Theatre History,’ New Theatre Quarterly, X: 38 (May 1994), 128.
Catherine Burroughs, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 87.
Frances Anne Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1878), Vol. 2, 5, 7–8, 59–60. All further references are to this edition.
Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 110–11.
Cited in Linda Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 229.
Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 180.
Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 112.
Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women, 113–14. Other critics have noted Kemble’s ambivalence; see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘Foreword’ to Monica Gough (ed.), Fanny Kemble: Journal of a Young Actress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), xv.
Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 27.
Dorothy Marshall, Fanny Kemble (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), 59–60
and Eleanor Ransome (intro. and ed.), The Terrific Kemble: A Victorian Self-Portrait from the Writings of Fanny Kemble (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 35–8.
J. S. Bratton, ‘Miss Scott and Miss Macaulay: “Genius Cometh in All Disguises”,’ Theatre Survey, 37: 1 (May 1996), 59. See also Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, Chapters 4 and 6.
See the Report from the Select Committee appointed to Inquire into the Laws Affecting Dramatic Literature, with the Minutes of Evidence (Parliamentary Papers, 1831–32, vii), Julia Swindells, ‘Behold the Swelling Scene! Shakespeare and the 1832 Select Committee,’ in Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (eds), Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 1, Theatre, Drama and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 29–46,
and Katherine Newey, ‘Reform on the London Stage,’ Joanna Innes and Arthur Burns (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 238–53.
Susan Carlson and Kerry Powell, ‘Reimagining the Theatre: Women Playwrights of the Victorian and Edwardian Period,’ in Kerry Powell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 254.
For detailed accounts of the 1843 competition see Ellen Donkin, ‘Mrs. Gore gives Tit for Tat,’ and Katherine Newey, ‘“From a Female Pen”: The Proper Lady as Playwright in the West End Theatre, 1823–1844,’ in Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (eds), Nineteenth-Century British Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
John Franceschina (ed.), Gore on Stage: The Plays of Catherine Gore (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 25–7,
and Katherine Newey (intro. and ed.), Catherine Gore’s Quid Pro Quo in Thomas Crochunis and Michael Eberle-Sinatra (eds), The Broadview Anthology of Women Playwrights Around 1800 (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006).
Julia Swindells, Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence (Oxford: Polity Press, 1985), 91.
G. H. L. [George Henry Lewes], ‘The Prize Comedy and the Prize Committee,’ Westminster Review, 42: 1 (September 1844), 106.
Brian E. Maidment, ‘Victorian Periodicals and Academic Discourse,’ in Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Michael Madden (eds), Investigating Victorian Journalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 150.
Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939), 120.
‘Miss Syrett’s Play,’ Saturday Review, 17 May 1902, reprinted in Max Beerbohm, More Theatres (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), 463–7.
Ann L. Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 120.
Viv Gardner, ‘The Invisible Spectatrice: Gender, Geography and Theatrical Space,’ in Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (eds), Women, Theatre, and Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 40–1.
Ann L. Ardis, ‘Netta Syretťs Aestheticization of Everyday Life,’ in Talia Schaffer and Kathy A. Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 245–6.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Randal Johnson (ed. and trans.) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 42.
Thomas C. Crochunis, ‘Joanna Baillie’s Ambivalent Dramaturgy,’ Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 170.
Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
and Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 76, 97.
See also Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181–2,
Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 4, ‘The Palladium of Liberty: Radical Journalism and Repression in the Postwar Era,’
and Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ‘Introduction: Locating a Plebeian Counterpublic Sphere.’
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 13.
Alison Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 4.
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Virago Press, 1989), 10.
Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), Chapter 3, ‘Novel Writing as an Empty Field.’
Reproduced in William E. Fredeman (ed.), The Victorian Poets The Biocritical Introductions to the Victorian Poets from A.H. Miles’s The Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Garland, 1986), 143–4.
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© 2005 Katherine Newey
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Newey, K. (2005). Rescuing the Stage. In: Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554900_2
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