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Since Virginia Woolf acclaimed the seventeenth-century poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn as both a proto-feminist figure and an important author in her own right, interest in the history of women's writing in English has grown enormously. Many universities now offer their students
the chance to explore the subject at undergraduate as well as postgraduate level - including the work of women playwrights.
In the century or so after Behn and other female playwrights of the Restoration, women took their place among men as dramatists; this was still a period, however, when women often met with
a hostile reception and ingrained male prejudice. Susannah Centlivre took to publishing her plays anonymously; her fellow writers endured poverty and prejudice in full measure. Fanny Burney had
one of her plays stopped in rehearsal by her father, yet Elizabeth Inchbald found great success, especially with her comedies, and in her work as an editor and translator. Jane Austen certainly enjoyed Inchbald's Lovers' Vows, an adaptation of a German melodrama, and used it to brilliant effect in her great novel Mansfield Park. Austen herself was an avid theatergoer, and wrote several dramatic sketches, one of which is also included in this volume.
The plays in this anthology show the range of work that women were writing for the stage, from immensely successful comedies about love and marriage to social satire, melodrama and tragedy. Major Voices: 18th Century Women Playwrights caters to general readers, students and theater
practitioners alike.
Contents
Includes a general introduction to the period and to each of the plays, together with extensive notes. The plays include A Bold Stroke for a Wife by Susannah Centlivre, A Wife to be Let by Eliza Haywood, The Witlings by Fanny Burney, The Belle's Strategem by Hannah Cowley, Lovers' Vows by Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sir Charles Grandison by Jane Austen.
About the Editor
MICHAEL CAINES is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and writes regularly for the paper on theater, fiction, and literary criticism.
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