Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain

by Edited by Tracy C. Davis , Ellen Donkin

• ISBN13: 9780521574136
• ISBN10: 0521574137
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-06-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Why does historical memory exclude nineteenth-century women playwrights when hundreds worked prolifically across the spectrum of professional theatre, amateur theatricals, and publishing? What might it mean to adjust the collective focus of cultural historians and literary critics so that these women can come into view? This collection of essays, written by a team of leading scholars in the field, undertakes not simply to recover the names and careers of women playwrights but to call into question the whole idea of what a playwright is, and what she does, and why it matters. Gender inquiry is the start: destabilising the category of playwrights loosens the borders of theatre history, making it possible to reconceptualize theatre and drama not as a product of culture but as social processes dynamically interacting with culture.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
List of contributors	xi
Acknowledgements	xv
Introduction	1	(14)
Tracy C. Davis
Ellen Donkin
PART I IN JUDGMENT
The sociable playwright and representative citizen	15	(20)
Tracy C. Davis
``To be public as a genius and private as a woman''	35	(19)
The critical framing of nineteenth-century British women playwrights
Gay Gibson Cima
Mrs. Gore gives tit for tat	54	(23)
Ellen Donkin
PART II WRIGHTING THE PLAY
Jane Scott the writer-manager	77	(22)
Jacky Bratton
Illusions of authorship	99	(26)
Jane Moody
Sarah Lane: questions of authorship	125	(26)
Jim Davis
PART III GEOGRAPHIES OF PRODUCTION
Staging the state: Joanna Baillie's Constantine Paleologus	151	(23)
Beth H. Friedman-Romell
The ``lady playwrights'' and the ``wild tribes of the East''	174	(19)
Female dramatists in the East End theatres, 1860--1880
Heidi J. Holder
``From a female pen''	193	(22)
The proper lady as playwright in the West End theatre, 1823--1844
Katherine Newey
PART IV GENRE TROUBLE
Genre trouble	215	(18)
Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Polack -- tragic subjects, melodramatic subjects
Susan Bennett
Sappho in the closet	233	(23)
Denise A. Walen
Conflicted politics and circumspect comedy	256	(21)
Women's comic playwriting in the 1890s
Susan Carlson
Appendix 1 Plays cited in this volume	277	(5)
Appendix 2 Plays by women dramatists in East End theatres 1860s--1880s	282	(4)
Heidi J. Holder
Index	286