Power Plays: Gender, Genre and Lynda La Plante

Abstract

Lynda La Plante is one of Britain’s most well-known and popular writers of television drama, yet her work has received little by way of scholarly attention during the course of a long career.¹ She has written numerous series dramas and single works covering a wide range of contemporary themes and social issues, but consistently returns to the crime series, and it is here that she has found her greatest success with Widows (1983, 1985, 1995) in 1983 and 1985, and Prime Suspect (1991–2006) in 1991, 1992 and 1993. In this short piece, I will concentrate on these landmark works and on a more recent production, Trial and Retribution (1997); I will suggest that the reasons for her critical neglect are primarily institutional, generated by facts within the broadcasting industry as well as in the critical echelons of academia that situate female writers on the margins of the ‘quality’ drama tradition in spite of their considerable success in creating innovative interventions in popular series formats. Feminist literary critics have consistently argued (from a range of different perspectives) that giving critical attention to particular authors and their works amounts to more than a neutral act of academic scholarship: it is also a political act of canon formation, ensuring that the works of a few key individuals are preserved for posterity.²