Victorian women used strategies that allowed them to not only work as actresses but also as directors, producers, translators, and playwrights, thus transforming theatre at the cusp of the New Drama. Female friendships were particularly integral to these strategies as women employed secretiveness and anonymity, charm and shrewdness, networking and collaborating in small and large groups to meet their creative and professional goals. Through these means of sociability women enlarged their spheres of influence beyond the stage. Elizabeth Robins is a superb example of these strategies, particularly when theatrical realism was her primary focus. Though she also collaborated well with men, William Archer and Henry James among them, it was Robins’s female friends who helped her to establish a London career. This project shows how Robins and her women friends contributed to the New Drama in dynamic, critical, and often-secret ways. Marion Lea and Robins finagled the rights to Hedda Gabler in 1891. Lea and Florence Bell helped Robins to translate plays for production and to develop new acting techniques suited to realism. After Lea left England, Robins and Bell joined Grein’s Independent Theatre Society to present their anonymously written protest play Alan’s Wife. These efforts illustrate the adaptive functions of female friendships. Through closer examination of their relationships, particularly the one Robins and Bell called a sisterhood, we see the nurturing functions of female friendships. This project explains some of the reasons why, despite being famous in their day, these women disappeared from history. It was not just because of male control of the theatre, but was also a product of their own desires to protect themselves. Secrecy had served them well in the 1890s, but their fame faded as even friends forgot them. Yet, since female socialization taught them to be group-focused, these women’s stories are highly pertinent to the history of the theatre, an art form that is collaborative by its nature. Through study of their work and their relationships, we can fill some gaps in theatre history, women’s history, and nineteenth-century history, adding resonance to their voices that may carry to coming generations.

This thesis examines issues of female agency in the plays The Rover and The Widow Ranter by Aphra Behn, Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw, and Votes for Women! by Elizabeth Robins. The heroines of each of these plays work toward gaining agency for themselves, and in order to achieve this goal, they often stray from cultural norms of femininity and encroach on the masculine world. This thesis postulates that agency for women becomes a fluid notion, not statically defined. These plays show a fluctuating and evolving sense of feminine agency.

To read a book or watch a play is to transport oneself to another place and time. However, it is not only the consumers of literature that travel; texts themselves can also make journeys. As is the case for Elin Améen’s play En moder, which has undergone a particular geographic and transformative journey, being based on the play Alan’s wife, an English reworking of Ameen’s Swedish novel ”Befriad”. Thus, the original text left its Swedish context and returned, via England, in a new form. The three works all share the same narrative: a young woman losing her husband in a workplace accident and then giving birth to their disabled child that she later kills. This study provides historical context to these three texts and compares them with a focus on the question of motherhood. By looking at motherhood in Swedish 19th-century drama, the study unveils the social conditions placed upon the protagonist and thus her actions, which in turn captures how motherhood at the time was constructed and reflected as a subject in the arts. As to do this, the study first compares the three texts to illuminate the distinct choices the Swedish and English authors made in their versions. Following this, the debate that took place in England following the premiere of Alan’s Wife is analyzed. Finally, the endings of the three texts are compared, as this is where they differ at its most. The analysis highlights differences between the texts, which are related to their socio-geographic contexts. Religion and punishment, in particular the death penalty, are given greater prominence in the English version, whilst in the Swedish novel and play, Améen, who authors both, sticks to her own beliefs and moral guidelines.

This study focuses on a series of late-century works by women writers that incorporate facets of theatrical performance into the printed book. Literary drama was a common genre of the Victorian and Edwardian period, used by writers such as Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold to elevate drama to the status of literature, a term synonymous with the printed page and the experience of reading. However, this project examines a series of women writers who, in contrast, used this hybrid form to challenge the assumed superiority of text. The values ascribed to the printed page—that it was a disembodied enterprise unattached to the whims of its audience or the particularities of its author—were antithetical to the experiences of women writers, whose work was often read in the context of their gendered bodies. My study proceeds chronologically, reading the literary dramas of five writers—George Eliot, Augusta Webster, Katharine Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper (writing under the pseudonym “Michael Field”), and Elizabeth Robins—alongside changes in print practice and theatrical staging as well as evolving discourses about “literariness.” I argue that these women allude to theatrical performance in the text to show that the page always bears the physical traces of its authors and its audience. Each chapter blends book studies with performance studies, showing the way the form of a work invites particular responses from its readers. Overall, this project has two goals: one, to recover marginalized texts by women writers and revise narratives about the period to incorporate these pieces; and two, to span the scholarly chasm between Victorian poetry and drama and demonstrate, instead, the mutually constitutive relationship of these two art forms.