Paula R. Backscheider

Revising women : eighteenth-century "women's fiction" and social engagement

Contents: The Novels Gendered Space, Paula R. Backscheider * The Rise of Gender as Political Category, Paula R. Backscheider * Renegotiating the Gothic, Betty Rizzo * My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriachal Authority Mitzi Myers * Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy, Barbara M. Benedict

Shadowing Theatrical Change

Eighteenth-century novels are filled with what became a set piece: a young heroine sits among her friends absorbed in a play.1 She is beautiful in profile, gentle in demeanour, intelligent, and marked by ideal sensibility. Her acquaintances chatter, flirt, call out, and make rude observations not only about the play but also about the heroine and her unfashionable behaviour in the theatre.

Frances Brooke: Becoming a Playwright

ABSTRACT The obstacles to having a play performed at the two patent theatres in London in the eighteenth century are familiar. The focus is usually on new-play-adverse production gatekeepers like David Garrick, but the limited opportunities to learn stagecraft are an equally powerful barrier. Understanding such things as blocking, casting decisions, and the possibilities and economics of set design and special effects not only facilitated acceptance for production, but contributed to the success of a play, as audiences had come to demand productions with spectacle and sound. The career of Frances Brooke offers the opportunity to see how a successful woman playwright learned stagecraft and used what she learned in two quite different plays produced in the early 1780s. Moreover, it uncovers the multidimensional collaborations that stand behind eighteenth-century productions. In 1773, after a long, successful career as a novelist, journalist and translator, Brooke took over co-managership of Kings Theatre, the London opera house, with, among others, the great tragic actress Mary Ann Yates. Shortly after this experience, her plays—the tragedy The Siege of Sinope and her pastoral musical comedy, Rosina—were performed at Covent Garden.