ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Dane’s drama and maps its themes onto the terrain of inter-war women’s plays written by Dodie Smith, G.B. Stern and Rachael Fergusson, whose careers on the London stage lasted like Dane’s from around 1921to beyond the Second World War. Dane’s dramas are set in both modern and historical times. Problem plays and comedies celebrate the liminality of modern women amid a pervasive crisis of masculinity in modern men while historical tragedies located variously in the nineteenth-century and biblical contexts, dramatise the resistance of female characters to harsh patriarchal regimes. She also wrote historical bio-dramas. Will Shakespeare (1921) re-imagines Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Fitton as feminist figures, and the bio-drama, Wild Decembers (1932), buoys up the ambition and achievements of the Brontë sisters.
