ABSTRACT
In a male-dominated society as Victorian Britain, the position of women in the theatre was often anomalous. Legislation demanded what society expected, that women should be dependent and invisible. Women theatre employees, even actresses, had to struggle through pregnancies without losing their place and endure the contradictions inherent in a life lived both in public and in private. Women playwrights were important for actresses who rarely received dynamic parts in male-authored plays. No wonder that by 1891 a Theatrical Ladies Guild, a sort of trade union for women employed in the theatre, had been formed. Accordingly, in the theatre family, women were more equal than in almost any other trade or profession. Dramatisations of women’s novels also sometimes explored life as women experienced it, none more so than notorious works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne.
