Theatrical Afterlives

Abstract This book is the first in-depth study of the theatrical afterlives of nineteenth-century women novelists. Whereas previous scholarship has shown a strong bias towards male writers, especially Charles Dickens, this monograph innovatively brings woman-authored novels centre stage—literally and metaphorically. Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Novels on the Stage examines the dramatic offspring of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and George Eliot, through particular, and sometimes unexpected, theatrical lenses (e.g., prison drama, Irish theatre, suffrage drama). It prioritizes the performance event—what actually happens onstage—through attention to a series of theatre ephemera, unpublished manuscript material, and specially commissioned interviews with practitioners. The book argues that the theatrical afterlives allegorize key socio-political debates and tensions of the past two hundred years, including the woman question, the Irish question, colonial legacies, and the #MeToo era. The dramatizations, the book concludes, matter, not only for what they tell us about how woman-authored novels have been utilized, but also because these plays provide a fresh methodology to access and re-read the novels themselves, and read them anew.