ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the linguistic strategies adopted by women writers to draw their women readers into the theatrical, cinematic, and/or operatic event about which they were writing. It argues that a mass, female, critical community of spectators, with its own lexicon of cultural criticism by and for women, was being established thanks to women writers' interventions in journalism addressed to a female readership. Through their commentaries on theatre-going in columns in journals for women, and theatre reviews in periodicals addressed to a female readership, women writers were inviting women spectators to watch and listen with a combination of critical acumen, emotional engagement, and surrender to pleasure. So practised and comfortable were women with the letter-writing format that it is hardly surprising to find evidence of the public female gaze in either published letters to the editor from readers in journals for women, or in columns whose titles bore reference to a personalised form of address.
