Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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.