This collection of essays recovers the names and careers of nineteenth-century women playwrights.

The Routledge Anthology of British Women Playwrights, 1777-1843 brings together ten eclectic plays by female dramatists and writers, to stimulate a rich discussion of women, writing, and theatre history. Ranging through tragedy, comedy, musical theatre and mixed-genre texts, this volume celebrates the breadth and experimental spirit of women's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dramatic writing. Each play is accompanied by an introductory essay that addresses its sociopolitical and theatrical contexts, and outlines its performance and reception history. The selections included here invite teachers and their students to study particular works by authors of note, but also to consider the differences between works written for page and stage. While many of the plays are recognizable as published dramas, they have been placed alongside textual artifacts that suggest plays or theatrical events of which no definitive record exists, as well as supplementary materials that invite teachers to engage their students in exploring women's dramatic writing in this era. Organized in chronological order, The Routledge Anthology of British Women Playwrights, 1777-1843 traces a history of women's writing across genres and styles, offering an invaluable resource to students and teachers alike.

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.

Getting Into the Act is a vigorous and refreshing account of seven female playwrights who, against all odds, enjoyed professional success in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Ellen Donkin relates fascinating, disturbing tales about the male theatre managers to whom they were indebted, and the trials and prejudices they endured, ranging from accusations of plagiarism to sexual harassment. This scarred turbulent early history still resonates in the late twentieth-century. The current ratio of female to male playwrights is virtually unchanged. Old patterns of male control persist, and playwriting continues to be a hazardous occupation for women. But within these scarred earlier histories there are equally powerful narratives of self-revelation, endurance, and professional triumph that may point to a new way forward. Getting Into the Act is entertaining and informative reading for anyone, from scholar to general reader, who is interested in the history and gender politics of the stage.

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

The essays collected in this volume include a selection of those presented at a conference in the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, in 2002. They highlight the existence of a European network of women's writing which became a valuable source of consciousness-raising, not only for European women writers, but also for their readers. The main theme running through the essays is love: women loving against the odds and transcending all kinds of obstacles. Does love speak a common language or is it inevitably linked to social mores and individual experience? Does desire work in the same way? Do love and desire have the power to subvert dichotomous thinking and motivate real change? The texts studied in this volume are both fictional and factual, from plays and novels to diaries, letters and drama performances. The countries the essays travel through, and the languages they encounter, all contribute to forming a magic web of connections, solidarities and ideas that truly cross boundaries.