Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son took the London theatre by storm in 1912. Following its triumphant run, the play toured to New York, was produced throughout England, and was translated and staged in multiple European locations. Yet Sowerby’s initial theatrical success would not be repeated. With historical hindsight, we can see Sowerby’s experience as comparable to that of many other women writers who struggled to achieve lasting recognition, especially when their work was perceived as critiquing the forces restricting women’s lives. These vivid domestic dramas explore timely questions of capitalism, feminism, and personal freedom. With the acclaimed revival of Rutherford at the National Theatre in 1994, and with the efforts by feminist scholars and theatre artists to rediscover the work of such forgotten women writers, Sowerby and her dramas have secured renewed interest. This edition gathers Rutherford and Son, its companion piece A Man and Some Women, and the postwar play The Stepmother. The edition will provide teachers, students, and artists with important historical contexts for Sowerby’s dramas and will demonstrate the ongoing cogency of these dynamic, insightful, and engaging plays.

Lois Relph, a young stepmother with two stepdaughters for whom she cares deeply and her own thriving business, appears contented and in charge. But this is 1924, so does she really have control of her own money, or even her life, and what will she be able to do if things are in danger of going wrong both personally and professionally? It needs courage and determination to define what being a wife, mother and businesswoman means and it is not easy. A story whose resonance is still felt today.

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading international scholars and artists on Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell's life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell's fiction, plays, and non-fiction in both historical and contemporary critical contexts, and demonstrates the significance of Glaspell's writing and other professional activities to a range of academic disciplines and artistic engagements. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell's works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell's career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection's thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

On 14 January 1910 Lytton disguised herself as a working-class seamstress, assumed the name Jane Warton, and led a suffrage demonstration demanding the vote for women. During the demonstration she hurled a rock wrapped in brown paper at the house of the governor of Walton Gaol. For this act, she was arrested, tried, and sentenced to fourteen days in jail. Like many suffragettes, she refused to eat while in custody and was forcibly fed, which involved forcing the mouth open, running a tube down the throat or through the nose, and pouring liquid into it. The procedure was both painful and dangerous. Lytton's decision to conceal her upper-class identity was a deliberately calculated act. She was devoted to the cause of female suffrage and was appalled at the class-differentiated treatment women (regardless of their offence) received in jail. This is an account of her prison experience and the differences when she was arrested as a middle class women and when she was arrested as Lady Constance Lytton, the daughter of an earl.

Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook is a helpful, practical guide to theatre-making which explores the different ways of representing gender. Best-selling author, Elaine Aston, takes the reader through the various stages of making feminist theatre- from warming up, through workshopped exploration, to performance - this volume is organised into three clear and instructive parts: * Women in the Workshop * Dramatic Texts, Feminist Contexts * Gender and Devising Projects. Orientated around the classroom/workshop, Handbook of Feminist Theatre Practice encompasses the main elements of feminist theatre, both practical or theoretical.

That James Joyce’s “The Dead” forms an extraordinary conclusion to his collection Dubliners, there can be no doubt. But as many have pointed out, “The Dead” may equally well be read as a novella—arguably, one of the finest novellas ever written. “The Dead,” a “story of public life,” as Joyce categorized it, was written more than a year after Joyce had finished the other stories in the collection, and was meant to redress what he felt was their “unnecessary harsh[ness].” Set on the feast of the epiphany, it is a haunting tale of connection and of alienation, reflecting, in the words of Stanislaus Joyce (James’s brother and confidant), “the nostalgic love of a rejected exile.” The present volume highlights “The Dead” for readers who wish to focus on that great work in a concise volume—and for university courses in which it is not possible to cover all of Dubliners. But it also gives a strong sense of how that story is part of a larger whole. Stories from each of the other sections of Dubliners have been included, and a wide range of background materials is included as well, providing a vivid sense of the literary and historical context out of which the work emerged.