Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (review)

In its primary purpose of recovering the forgotten works of nineteenth-century women playwrights and in its attention to the criticism of Victorian women writers in the periodical press, Katherine Newey's Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain has much in common with Elaine Showalter's groundbreaking A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977). That Newey's book was written almost thirty years after Showalter's testifies to the amount of work that remains to be done on Victorian theater. Indeed, one of this book's greatest contributions to the field of Victorian studies is that it traces how the "disappearance" of the "highly visible . . . and respected" professional woman playwright resulted from "the reorganization of capital and culture in the early nineteenth century," which, in turn, led to increasingly rigid gender ideologies and changes in the theater, changes which even now contribute to the neglect of Victorian drama (34–35). Newey demonstrates "the difficulties for women playwrights thrown up by the conflicts between theatre as an art and theatre as an industry" (68), showing how factors such as respectability, exceptionality, and family "enabl[ed] women's activity and render[ed] it invisible simultaneously" (72). This invisibility lasted into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as feminists and literary scholars overlooked women playwrights who negotiated with, rather than challenged, gendered expectations in exchange for commercial success.

The difficulty of this undertaking is clear, as Newey points out in her discussion of women's work in minor theaters (87). Because many of the records of these theaters are not archived, Newey's pursuit of these women writers in specific theater collections, the periodical press, and memoirs is in itself an interesting feature of this book. The result of this research is a new narrative of nineteenth-century theater, one that challenges the traditional "male-centred account of the British theatre": "the historiographical model of a smooth evolutionary development towards psychological realism and representational naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century" (9). This theater history also provides new insight into the lives and works of women writers. Felicia Hemans's dramas, for example, "offered her a freedom and a strength of expression which was not available in other forms and styles," and "reading Mary Russell Mitford's plays against the work which is probably her lasting memorial—her pastoral idylls starting with Our Village—reveals a tougher and less ideologically 'feminine' intelligence" (53).

While Newey's title suggests a focus on Victorian theater, the book argues that the disappearance of Hemans and Mitford into the fissure between the Romantic and Victorian periods "suggests how a more inclusive history of the theatre might require us to rethink the Romantic/Victorian boundaries" (43). Newey holds that "the continuities" between these eras and between literature and the stage "are as significant as the breaks," and that "a study of women playwrights who aspired to join literature and the theater is one starting place for such a revisionist project" (43). Methodologically, Newey's book succeeds in exploring the continuities between Romantic and Victorian literature, moving fluidly back and forth across the period from the 1820s to the end of World War I in a series of chapters that explore women playwrights and their relationships to home and professional life. Newey identifies a significant break in theater history in the early 1860s with the emergence of sensation drama, the long run, increasingly middle-class audiences, and the greater mobility of audiences. She also notes a historical shift in the growth of female theater-goers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Women's Theatre Writing investigates continuities between literature and the stage as well, considering the role of the drama in the careers of writers who wrote in a variety of literary forms and examining the closet dramas of Augusta Webster and George Eliot as theater. At the same time, however, Newey only briefly analyses the texts—plays...