ABSTRACT
When David Garrick died in January of 1779, he left in his wake a group of women playwrights who suddenly found themselves without a mentor. In the vacuum created by his death, a brief but violent controversy erupted between the two most prominent of these playwrights, Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) and Hannah More (1745–1833), both of whom had made successful theatre debuts as the result of Garrick's careful sponsorship. In the summer of 1779, Hannah Cowley accused Hannah More of having plagiarized. She stated in the press that More's production of The Fatal Falsehood, which had opened in May of 1779, had borrowed substantially from Cowley's play Albina, which opened in July of 1779 but allegedly had been written some three years before.
