ABSTRACT
This chapter shows female playwrights principally cast their lead characters in traditional roles: ingenues, wives, and mothers. By the 1890s, the opening of access to higher education and some professions for women permitted the foreshadowing of a future with a multitude of opportunities, but in those days the only truly sanctioned path remained marriage and motherhood. The most popular character type for a female lead remained the ingénue, the Womanly Woman in her purest form: young, beautiful, and innocent. One of the dominant figures of the English stage in the 1890s was a female anti-heroine, the Womanly Woman gone badly, her “fall” exemplified by her active sexuality. The enormous commercial success of The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy established female audiences as an economic force in the theatre, and showed that women playwrights knew how to cater for them.
