Author Description

This groundbreaking anthology, part of the Women, Theatre and Performance series, brings together an extraordinary mix of one-act and full length plays and solo performance texts written by women. Included in the volume are texts by Beatrice Herford, Ruth Draper, Zora Neale Hurston, and G.B. Stern, originally performed across commercial and amateur theaters in Britain and America. Some of the plays have remained unpublished since their original performance – Georgina Weldon's Not Alone, Clothilde Graves' Mother of Three, Rachel Crother's Ourselves, and Marie Stope's Our Ostriches. Others are anthologized here alongside plays with which they connect aesthetically and historically, for example, Edith Lyttelton's Warp and Woof, Elizabeth Robins' Votes for Women, Elizabeth Baker's Edith, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, and Aimée Stuarts' Nine Till Six. The volume, for students and scholars, provides an accessible collection of texts exemplifying the range and breadth of women's theater writing from the 1880s to the early decades of the twentieth century.