Women and Victorian Theatre Powell Paperback Cambridge University Press

Women and Victorian TheatreAuthor(s): Kerry Powell\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521033299, 978-0521033299\nSynopsis\nVictorian women were exhilarated by the authoritative voice and the professional opportunity that, uniquely, the theatre offered them. Victorian men, anxious to preserve their dominance in this as in every other sphere of life, sought to limit the theatre as being distinctively, irrevocably masculine. Actresses were represented as inhuman monstrosities, not women at all. Furthermore, the executive functions of theatre-manager and playwright were carefully defined as requiring supposedly masculine qualities of mind and personality. A woman playwright came to be seen as an impossibility, although their number actually increased towards the close of the nineteenth century. In this book, Kerry Powell chronicles the development of women's participation in the theatre as playwrigh.