Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890-1918

Anna Farkas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315405124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

The influence of the women's movement has long been a scholarly priority in the study of British women's drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but previous scholarship has largely clustered around two events: the New Woman in the 1890s and the suffrage campaign in the years before the First World War. Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890 – 1918 is the first designated study of British women's drama from a period of exceptional productivity and innovation for female playwrights.

Both the British theatre and women's position within British society underwent fundamental changes in this period, and this book shows how female dramatists carefully negotiated their position in the heated debates about women's rights that occurred at this time, while staking out a place for themselves in an evolving theatrical landscape. Farkas also identifies the women's movement as a key influence on the development of female-authored drama between 1890 and 1918, but argues that scholarly prioritizing of the "radicalism" of work associated with the New Woman and the suffrage campaign has had a distorting effect in the past.

Ideal for scholars of British and Victorian theatre, Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890 – 1918 offers a new perspective which emphasizes the complexity of women playwrights' engagement with first-wave feminism and links it to the diversification of the British theatre in this period.

Chapter 1

The female playwright in the 1890s

In the early 1890s, British journalists frequently commented on the scarcity of female playwrights. All the Year Round noted, “though we can count women novelists by the score, the number of women dramatists is extremely limited, and can easily be told off on the fingers”.¹ The Women’s Herald found it “somewhat remarkable, considering the many attractions which it holds out as a field of literary work, that the drama should be so sparingly cultivated by women”.² By the turn of the century, the situation had changed. In December 1900, Woman’s Life published an article entitled “Famous Women Dramatists”, drawing attention to “the large number of literary women who are now using the stage for the expression of their views and the telling of their stories.”³ The year before, in another article on the topic, the same publication had stated that, “although the present century has not produced any female Shakespeare, many of the plays written by ladies have had as great a success as those written by their male confrères”.⁴

Kate Newey has calculated that “work in the 1890s makes up just over half the total of women’s writing for the theatre in the nineteenth century. Thus for women writers the 1890s can be seen as epoch-making simply in the sheer volume of their dramatic work made public”.⁵ This upsurge was related to economic and structural changes in the late-Victorian theatre industry. The “profit-sharing revolution” in the second half of the nineteenth century provided a powerful financial incentive for playwrights, as John Russell Stephens has demonstrated in his book The Profession of the Playwright (1992).⁶ In the 1860s, Dion Boucicault first negotiated a percentage of the receipts for the rights to his plays, instead of the traditional practice of paying the author a lump sum, and made enormous profits with his hit play The Colleen Bawn (1860) and subsequent productions.⁷ By the 1890s, this practice was widely established in the West End.

Stephens only discusses male playwrights, but women were not blind to the advantages of this new arrangement either. In 1892, The Woman’s Herald published an article on “Women as Dramatists” with the explicit purpose of directing “the attention of the rising generation of women writers … to this rich and attractive field, which at no other period of its history ever yielded so golden a harvest”.⁸ The author, A. J. Park, gave a detailed breakdown of the profits a successful play might accrue:

The usual payment … where a sum down is not previously fixed upon, is ten per cent on the gross nightly returns. In a house which has a seating accommodation for two hundred pounds, this means twenty pounds a night, or, including the now inevitable matinée performance, a sum of a hundred and forty pounds a week. When it is remembered that a successful play may run for twelve months or more, and that in addition there are generally two provincial companies touring at the same time, and bringing in between them about another hundred and forty pounds a week, and that besides the London and provincial royalties, there are Colonial and American rights to be disposed of, while the play itself may be from time to time revived, some idea of the handsome gains of the dramatist may readily be conceived.⁹

Ten years later, a number of female playwrights had actually become both rich and famous through their success in the theatre. In 1903, Woman’s Life wrote, “if one were asked to what profession should a woman devote herself to make a fortune, and make it rapidly, the answer would unhesitatingly be: ‘Be a dramatist if you have the genius.’”¹⁰

The dominant narrative of the female playwright thus changed considerably during the 1890s. Commercial success made celebrities of some and inspired many others to try their hand at dramatic authorship. But modern scholarly assessments have not necessarily reflected this. Instead, the picture Kerry Powell painted in his book Women and Victorian Theatre (1997) was bleak. He identified two barriers for aspiring women playwrights in the late-Victorian period: one structural, the other ideological. Powell wrote that the Victorian theatre recruited most of its authors from “some other male-dominated area of employment – for example, stage-management … or journalism and dramatic criticism”.¹¹ In addition, the social network of the club provided important opportunities for making connections with established theatre professionals, but only for men. As a result, access to the profession of the playwright “was controlled through the masculine domains of theatre management, law, journalism and men’s clubs”.¹² Women additionally faced the prejudice that their very femaleness rendered them incapable of writing good plays. According to Powell, male critics “theorize[d] playwriting in a way that emphasized certain qualities of mind – scientific, technical, intellectual – that Victorians rarely associated with women”.¹³ Drama was considered an inherently masculine art, and was distinguished as such from fiction, where the achievements of women could not be denied. Powell’s conclusion was that “a woman playwright came to seem an impossibility”.¹⁴

This chapter challenges this interpretation. While the difficulties Powell details were undoubtedly real, they did not prevent women from writing for the stage. Women did not meet only with discouragement from the public when they did so. The remarkable rise in the number of women who had plays staged in the final decade of the nineteenth century and the striking success of some of them instead led to the woman playwright becoming an object of interest for the periodical press. Articles were published about the history of women’s playwriting and celebrity news media, for whom a long run in the West End was as noteworthy as a bestselling novel, shone a spotlight on successful female dramatists in interviews. The hostility Powell described, therefore, competed with the usual trappings of literary fame. I argue that discourses about the woman playwright in the 1890s were in flux and full of contradictions, not least so when articulated by the dramatists themselves. Female playwriting became a significant site in the wider debates about women’s abilities and limitations in the concluding decade of the century, with the female playwright emerging as an ambivalent activist.

The history of women’s playwriting

Kerry Powell’s insights into the often-misogynistic practices of the Victorian theatre industry led him to conclude that “aspiring women playwrights … could have felt little or no sense of a women’s tradition in drama”.¹⁵ Evidence from the periodical press suggests, however, that the increased visibility of women playwrights in the 1890s sparked curiosity about the history of female-authored drama. All the Year Round and The Era both cited recent productions – “two plays written by women and produced at leading London theatres … during the theatrical season 1894”¹⁶ and “the extraordinary success of Miss Clo Graves’s farcical play A Mother of Three”¹⁷ in 1896 – as the motivation for enquiries into the history of women’s playwriting. Both pieces provided brief sketches of authors’ lives and work, but The Era article was the wider-reaching of the two, as it covered the period from the mid-sixteenth century to the 1880s and named twenty-nine playwrights in all, while All the Year Round focused on a smaller selection of prominent authors: Susanna Centlivre, Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah More, and Mary Russell Mitford. The evaluations of the achievements of the individual artists were generous and ungrudging, emphasising the remarkable success many of them had enjoyed in their own time and noting the lasting merit of some of their works. For Centlivre, for example, All the Year Round related the anecdote that “Congreve gave up writing plays in a fit of pique, because his ‘Way of the World’ was totally neglected, while Mrs Centlivre’s ‘Wonder’ attracted crowded houses”,¹⁸ while the Era observed that Centlivre’s “works are marked with much elegance and spirit”, that more than a hundred years after her death they were still “known to the present generation of players and playgoers”.¹⁹

The authors of both articles refrained from the conclusion, however, that female playwrights were, therefore, as capable as male. The Era preceded its list of dramatists and their various achievements with the caveat that “most women are devoid of deep and mirthful humour”, while the writer for All the Year Round revealed their reservations about women’s ability as playwrights most clearly when they meant to praise most unreservedly: Joanna Baillie’s “plays stand out for their masculine strength and vigour … her plays … will always remain remarkable achievements; there is nothing womanish or weak about them, and passages of real force and fire abound”.²⁰ This is an example of what Kerry Powell has identified as “the Victorian tendency to define playwriting so as to exclude women … If a woman wrote a good play … the fact could be explained by the woman playwright’s masculine style”.²¹ Where Powell errs, however, is in the assumption that such observations reflected an attitude to female playwriting that was consistently applied by newspaper critics in the 1890s. An introductory sentence which cited inherent female shortcomings as the reason why “female dramatists have been few and far between, though quite a large number of authoresses have essayed to write for the stage” in The Era article was followed by two solid columns listing almost thirty women playwrights who did succeed, resulting in an impression of abundance rather than scarcity.²² Also, the descriptions of the individual playwrights highlighted their successes, but failed to refer again to the natural li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The female playwright in the 1890s
• 2. The New Woman on the stage
• 3. Ingénues, wives, and mothers: Women’s drama in the West End
• 4. The orthodox roots of suffrage theatre
• 5. A new heroine for a new century: Women’s drama and the modernist theatre
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index