ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representation of the New Woman in female-authored drama of the 1890s to test if “New Woman drama” is a helpful category. It shows how, at the hands of three of the leading male playwrights of the late-Victorian theatre, the caricature New Woman became a fixture in the West End. The chapter examines how women playwrights responded, both in the commercial theatre and under the auspices of the subscription societies that represented the beginnings of the modernist theatre in Britain. The New Woman was a caricature, a conglomeration of fads and short-lived moral panics, a defensive response to the prospect of societal change as a result of the rise of the women’s movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Modern scholars have overwhelmingly located examples of feminist “New Woman drama” in the performative context.
