This is an alphabetical list of women playwrights who were active in England and Wales, and the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland before approximately 1800, with a brief indication of productivity. Nota Bene : Authors of dramatic works are the focus of this list, though many of these writers worked in more than one genre.
A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or sometimes out loud in a large group. The contrast between closet drama and classic "stage" dramas dates back to the late eighteenth century. The literary historian Henry A. Beers considers closet drama "a quite legitimate product of literary art."
Elizabeth Inchbald was an English novelist, actress, dramatist, and translator. Her two novels, A Simple Story and Nature and Art, have received particular critical attention.
Sarah Green was an Irish-English author, one of the ten most prolific novelists of the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
Mary Collier (1688–1762) was an English poet, perhaps best known for The Woman's Labour, a poem described by one commentator as a "plebeian female georgic that is also a protofeminist polemic."
Hedgebrook is a rural retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island, Washington, founded in 1988. Hedgebrook's artist-in-residence program accepts up to 80 writers each year, who spend two to four weeks in residence working on their diverse writing projects. Each writer stays in her own hand-crafted cottage. Room and board are provided at no cost to the writers-in-residence. The retreat is a working farm, offering organic produce for the writers, and communal dinners each night prepared by in-house chefs.
Maria Susanna Cooper was an English novelist, children's author, and poet, best known for her epistolary novels. Her writing, didactic and conservative, focused on appropriate roles for daughters, wives, and mothers.
This is a chronological list of women playwrights who were active in England and Wales, and the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland before approximately 1800, with a brief indication of productivity. Nota Bene: Authors of dramatic works are the focus of this list, though many of these writers worked in more than one genre.)
Mary Scott's The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead (1775) is both a celebration of women's literary achievements, as well as an impassioned piece of advocacy for women's right to literary self-expression.
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (1986), by Dale Spender, is a foundational study for the reclamation project central to feminist literary studies in English in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Mary Julia Young was a prolific novelist, poet, translator, and biographer, active in the Romantic period, who published the bulk of her works with market-driven publishers James Fletcher Hughes and William Lane of the Minerva Press. She is of particular interest as an example of a professional woman writer in "a market of mass novel production."
Elizabeth Purbeck and Jane Purbeck were English sisters and co-authors during the Romantic era who published six novels between 1789 and 1802.