Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century

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.

Author Biography

Laura Monros-Gaspar is Full Professor in English Literature at the Universitat de Valencia in Spain, where she leads the “Literature, Arts and Performance” Research Group and the “Women Staging and Re-Staging” projects. She is Research Associate at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at the University of Oxford, secretary of the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Society in Spain (VINS) and collaborates with the ChoRuS Reception Scholarship network. She is founder and General Editor of the series Encuentros: Cultura y Literatura at PUV and has translated Florence Nightingale’s essay “Cassandra” into Spanish.

Victoria Puchal Terol holds a PhD in English Language, Literature and Culture from the Universitat de Valencia (2020). Her main lines of research are nineteenth-century popular theatre and gender and cultural studies. She is a full-time lecturer at Valencian International University (VIU), where she is also the Head of the English and Spanish specialisations at the Master’s Degree in Secondary Education Teacher Training. Puchal is a member of the Research Group “Literature, Arts and Performance” at Universitat de Valencia (GIUV2017‑354), and part of the Literary Assemblage Project (RELY).