Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century: Great Britain and Beyond

Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century is the first book to explore overlooked histories of women who filled the theatrical stages of the nineteenth century, dialoguing with contemporary adaptations, reworkings, and retellings of these histories in Great Britain and beyond. Female managers, playwrights, and performers emerge from the archives to forge geographical and temporal ‘intertheatricalities’ with contemporary productions by women who revisit and re-stage the period and with neo-Victorian fiction written by women and inspired by Victorian stage practices and spectacle. Chapters navigate from Great Britain to Australia, from Japan to the United States, to offer a glimpse of the indisputable influence of women in the theatrical scene of the period. The women who populate this book—Joanna Baillie, Florence Wilson, Ritsuko Mori, Emily Massingberd, Louisa Maria Ann Cremer (Mrs. T. P. Cooke), Minnie Maddern Fiske, Lolita Chakrabarti, Kip Williams, and others—reveal essential histories of nineteenth-century spectacle that hold significant implications for the roles of gender and chronology in theatre and English studies. This book is for postgraduates, researchers, and academics engaged primarily with English Studies, Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Women Studies.