Thousands of Noras: Short Plays by Women, 1875-1920

By Sherry Engle and Susan Croft

Thousands of Noras: Short Plays by Women, 1875-1920 provides an international collection of dramatic works written by women that draw attention to the power and range of voices of several generations of women writers. Sketches, monologues, duologues and plays from the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are represented. It includes works by playwrights considered marginal, as well as lesser-known works by established writers such as Elizabeth Baker, Catherine Amy Dawson-Scott, Ruth Draper, Miles Franklin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Amy Levy, Katherine Mansfield, and Netta Syrett.

Divided into three thematic sections, this volume includes plays that focus on womens aspiration for higher education, their need for paid employment, and the disillusionment often experienced in the working world. It offers pieces that address social activismcampaigns for the vote, for national independence in Ireland, for temperance, and for workers rights. And it presents lighter fare where writers satirize womens clubs, contemporary fads, and even theatre-going and playwriting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491768037

Sherry Engle

SHERRY ENGLE, Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, is the author of New Women Dramatists in America, 1880-1920. SUSAN CROFT, Director of Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre in Britain, is a writer, curator and historian. Visit her online at [e-mail] Both have written extensively on women playwrights.

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THOUSANDS OF NORAS

SHORT PLAYS BY WOMEN, 1875-1920

Copyright © 2015 Sherry Engle and Susan Croft.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6804-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6803-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907581

iUniverse rev. date:   10/19/2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Emerging Women Playwrights and the Short Play

I EDUCATION AND THE WORLD OF WORK

The Sweet Girl Graduate (1882) by Sarah Ann Curzon

The Unhappy Princess: An Extravaganza for Little People (1888) by Amy Levy

Act I of The Finding of Nancy (1902) by Netta Syrett

Miss Tassey (1910) by Elizabeth Baker

Three Women (1911) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Cousin Mary (1912) by Catherine Dawson-Scott

Life on Broadway: The Disillusions of Flossie (1913) by Helen Green Van Campen

The Common Round (1917) by Katherine Mansfield

II NEW WOMEN, SUFFRAGE AND OTHER CAUSES

Matrimonial Bliss, a Scene from Real Life (1872) by Ida M. Buxton

The New Woman Considered (1900) by Sarah Marshall Graham

Not Made in Heaven (1909) by Mary Costello

A Temperance Sketch (1905) by Susan Varian

The Master (1899) by Gertrude Mouillot

A Defence of the Fighting Spirit (1909) by Christopher St John

The Pot and the Kettle (1909) by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John

Leaguers and Peelers; or, the Apple Cart A Dramatic Saga of the Dark Ages in Two Acts (1911) by Susan L. Mitchell

Lady Butterby and Mrs MacBean (1912) by ‘S’

The Salvation of Her Sex (1913) by Mabel Lawrence

The Waiter Speaks (1913) by Miles Franklin

One of the Old Guard (1914) by Constance Campbell

The Bird Child: a play of the South (1914) by Lucy White

III CLUBS, FADS, AND THE CULTURAL MOMENT

Rational Dress (1892) by Ina Leon Cassilis

Shattered Nerves, a Duologue (1899) by H. L. (Harriet Louisa) Childe-Pemberton

The Advertising Girls, a Masque of Very Fly Leaves in Two Scenes (1900) by Amelia Sanford

The Sweet Elysium Club (1900) by Alice E. Ives

Society for the Suppression of Slang (1905) by Marie Irish (Evelyn Simons)

As Molly Told It (1909) by Paul Marion (Pauline Phelps and Marion Short)

A Class in Greek Poise (1910) by Ruth Draper

Bumps (1911) by Lillie Davis

The Universal Impulse (1911) by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

Works Cited

Appendix: Playwrights & Their Plays

The Editors

Notes

Endnotes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Little did we know when we began this volume of short plays by women that this would turn into a ten-year project of searching for and reading hundreds of plays while maintaining other demands on our energy, time and attention. But our mutual interest in early women writers and desire to see these plays in print have spurred us on. During this time I have relied on Susan’s phenomenal memory for obscure bits of information on women dramatists. Her networking prowess in securing places for me to house-sit while staying in London proved especially useful. She generously provided meals, guidance with London mass transit, and a bed when needed; what is more, her wonderful family always welcomed me into their home.

Research trips to London and elsewhere would not have been possible without funding through Faculty Research Grants from Borough of Manhattan Community College and a Research Award from PSC-CUNY Foundation. I am most appreciative for a semester sabbatical from teaching which allowed time for research and writing this project. Deep gratitude goes to Dr. Susana Powell and all BMCC colleagues who offered encouragement and occasional nudging.

For locating plays and information on the dramatists in this volume, we spent innumerable hours both separately and together at archives and libraries. We are especially grateful for the helpful staff of the New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, along with resources of the British Library, the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, the British Library Newspaper Archive, and the Women’s Library (now @ the LSE) in London. In addition, librarian Dorothea Coiffee at BMCC assisted in acquiring out-of-print plays through inter-library loan services.

Love and appreciation to my children, Drew Johnson and Brooke Gonzales, and to my mother, Margaret Engle. I offer heartfelt thanks to Maria Beach, Elizabeth Stroppel and Marlene Sider for your constant emotional support and friendship, as well as to David Gunderson, dear friend and copy-editor extraordinaire, for lending your sage advice for this volume.

Sherry Engle

I would like to thank Sherry, my co-editor, for her endurance and determination, for keeping us on track, for hours of stimulating conversation, for her generosity in tracking down and sharing contacts, grants, obscure volumes and photocopies, and for her dedicated research trips to explore archived materials in far-flung libraries of the US. I also want to thank fellow researchers of the suffrage movement, Susan Bradley Smith, Elizabeth Crawford and V. Irene Cockroft for their help in discovering hard-to-find materials. I acknowledge Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance where I am Clive Barker Visiting Research Fellow and am grateful for the support of Research Professor Nesta Jones and her work.

I wish to thank my mother Cathy Croft, as well as my partner Peter Beringer and children Luke and Freya Croft Beringer for your understanding, patience (most of the time) and support; thanks also to Penny McHale and Alda Terracciano for sharing a vital ongoing dialogue on feminism, theatre and how to live.

Susan Croft

THANKS TO OUR READERS: Who, out of curiosity, or interest in theatre and early women playwrights are reading this volume. We hope you enjoy it and welcome your responses. Any scholarly contribution you might have on any of these women is appreciated! We can be reached at [e-mail] or www.unfinishedhistories.com.

INTRODUCTION:

Emerging Women Playwrights

and the Short Play

Thousands of Noras have crept silently out of narrow homes into the broad walks of life, crept silently up into every vocation, every profession. As a business factor, as creator, woman has become a power in our drama.

Martha Morton, 1907¹

Decades between 1870 and 1920 represent an upsurge of writing by women across all genres and reflect a vital period where women questioned social roles, campaigned for the vote, and entered the workforce in growing numbers. American playwright Martha Morton observed in 1907, like Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, women were rejecting the patronizing designation of the fairer sex. Women and girls increasingly flocked to public theatre which led to many of them taking up playwriting. Often writing on contemporary life and satirizing outmoded thinking, women playwrights created a wide range of new works that put their own concerns center stage.

This period also became the heyday of the one-act play, presented in theatres as curtain-raisers, afterpieces, or in bills of short plays staged by an increasing number of community drama groups. Short plays in Britain could be designed for club performances on Sunday afternoons, thus, avoiding the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship.² Feminists of the suffrage campaign used short pieces to entertain or inspire audiences. A woman writer might even be commissioned by specific groups to quickly create a dramatic piece as propaganda; short and portable for easy staging, such plays demonstrate the energy and fervor fueling social movements of the period.

Because of their abbreviated length and association with amateur productions, short plays are often seen as peripheral to legitimate theatre. Like other forms often associated with women—short stories, radio plays, and plays for children—these works have been dismissed by some scholars as insignificant. Among these shorter pieces, however, are fascinating, even powerful plays that deserve recognition and analysis. Recovered works by women writers provide us with a historical perspective on women’s attitudes, manners, and customs. As posited by Rosemarie K. Bank, reading a play as a social document can benefit our understanding of images of women, along with the relationship of those images to the sociocultural historical context out of which they grew.³ Similarly Drew Eisenhauer in Intertextuality in American Drama refers to performed works as significant cultural texts and often linguistic ones as well, in the sense that there is an informed use of language—whether written, spoken, projected, or deconstructed—deserving of the same criticism, analysis, interpretation and scholarship as the language of other literary and artistic genres.⁴ With this in mind, plays in this volume have been selected for social and cultural identification of the period in which they were written.

Captivated by the vast array of subject matter, opinions, and theatrical forms, as well as the sheer volume of little-known short plays by women, we agreed that many of these works deserve recognition and ought to be offered for reading and staging. While a number of anthologies of plays by women have been published, we know of no international collection of short dramatic works written by early women.⁵ With the exception of specialized topics such as works by women of color and collections of suffrage plays, short plays by women have been largely overlooked. We surmised that a volume of early short works could draw attention to the power and range of voices of several generations of women writers.

Thousands of Noras: Short Plays by Women, 1875-1920, is divided into three thematic sections. Education and the World of Work includes plays that focus on women’s aspiration for higher education, their need for paid employment, and the disillusionment often experienced in the working world. The second section, New Women, Suffrage, and Other Causes, features dramatic pieces that address social activism—significantly, campaigns for the vote, for national independence in Ireland, for temperance, and for workers’ rights. Activism naturally led women into social groupings for campaigning, self-education, or mutual support, contributing to the rise of women’s clubs—both celebrated and mocked in contemporary culture. Thus, our third section, Clubs, Fads, and the Cultural Moment, displays lighter fare where writers satirize women’s clubs, contemporary fads, and even theatre-going and playwriting. Each section begins with an introductory essay providing the context of the plays, discussing themes, plots, and characters. Where available, we include biographical information on the playwrights.

Important to note is that in the late nineteenth-century plays and sketches appeared regularly in popular magazines, journals, and newspapers.⁶ Sarah Ann Curzon’s The Sweet Girl Graduate, for example, was published in a Canadian journal, Grip-Sack, in 1882. Susan Varian’s A Temperance Sketch appeared in 1905 in the newspaper United Irishman. The Vote, a publication of the Actresses’ Franchise League, included suffrage plays such as Christopher St. John’s A Defence of the Fighting Spirit. Nancy Woodrow, a prolific writer, employed dramatic form in her satiric The Universal Impulse, published in Smart Set in 1911. Charlotte Perkins Gilman ran plays such as her own Three Women in her feminist journal, The Forerunner. Plays in earlier magazines were written to express ideas, to promote a cause, or to entertain readers. Quite plausibly, rather than being professionally produced, published plays would be given staged readings in parlors or at women’s club gatherings.

Two examples in this collection were among the thousands of plays by women written for younger audiences. The Unhappy Princess, a clever fairy tale told through verse by Amy Levy contains a message on the merits and rewards of a work ethic for girls. And from Marie Irish’s vast store of short pieces for young audiences, we include The Society for the Suppression of Slang.

This collection brings together sketches, monologues, and plays from the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada—with the majority being English and American. Although it represents works by playwrights considered marginal, we also include lesser-known works by established writers such as Katharine Mansfield, Amy Levy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ruth Draper, Miles Franklin, Elizabeth Baker, and Catherine A. Dawson-Scott.

When perusing these plays, readers may note differences in spelling, punctuation, syntax, and formatting. For continuity, we chose to change most British spellings to American, although at times the text remains as written, as in St. John’s title, A Defence of the Fighting Spirit. And while we trimmed some stage directions for readablity, we have kept most of the capitalization (or not) of words as written. We felt it crucial to preserve the language, slang, and dialect of characters, such as Mrs. Moore, the amusing cockney porter’s wife in The Finding of Nancy:

Yes, Miss. Reg’ler shime it is. As nice a young lidy as ever stepped, and a pleasure to wite on, slavin’ all day long, and of evenings clickin’ awy on that there ’orrid thing. (Pointing with disgust to typewriter on side table.)

Although some words or lines may be difficult to understand, reading them aloud should help, along with noting definitions of more obscure expressions provided in footnotes.

It is our hope that in reading these dramatic works, published between 1874 and 1917, readers will gain insight into women’s experience of the period and come to appreciate the unique voices and talents of the authors. Our goal has been to make these plays accessible for study, instruction, enactment, or simply for personal enjoyment. We hope you will agree with us that the ideas, sentiments, and humor in these pieces are not only revealing of their time, but may also resonate with the experience of women today.

SECTION I

EDUCATION AND THE WORLD OF WORK

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society—more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860–1935⁷

Access to education has always been (and remains globally) one of the key demands of feminism. In nineteenth-century Britain this aspiration pivoted around rights to a decent secondary education and led to the formation of women’s high schools, including those with the first headmistresses, Dorothea Beale at Cheltenham Ladies College and Frances Buss at North London Collegiate School.⁸ At the same time, Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and other women were beginning the long campaign that would lead to the establishment of women’s colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, while Elizabeth Garrett Anderson began the fight for women’s admission to medical school.⁹ In the United States, private secondary schools (known as seminaries) for young women developed in the early 1800s to further educational opportunities for women.¹⁰ Among the first institutions to provide higher education for women that was equal to education for men were the Seven Sisters colleges in the Northeast. Mount Holyoke opened in Massachusetts in 1836 and Vassar, the first of the Sister institutions to become a full college, opened in 1861.¹¹ Still, higher education for women remained controversial and, when made available, was generally described as a means for women to better prepare themselves for future domestic responsibilities, such as rearing children.¹²

Thus, some plays of this period addressed the struggle for women to gain an education. An early example is Canadian Sarah Anne Curzon’s The Sweet Girl Graduate, which uses poetic language to mock the idea that women could not study at university level because they would either prove a distraction to male students or were not intelligent enough. Following the lead of many Shakespearean heroines, Curzon’s character Kate concocts a scheme of disguising herself in masculine apparel so she can attend Toronto University. Taking her cousin, Orphea, and a boarding-house mistress into her confidence, she rents a room as Mr Tom Christopher, attends the university for two years in disguise, and graduates with honors, winning the Gold Medal in Mathematics and Natural Sciences. In the last scene, Kate appears before her fellow students, transformed into her feminine self.

The play mocks a society that finds it acceptable for young men and women to freely spend time in each other’s company with the aim of marriage, yet considers it morally dangerous for women to study alongside men, [f]or fear you’d turn the heads of all the boys, as her father claims. Indeed, Kate points out the absurdity that mothers, including her own, allow their daughters to go to picnics, parties, balls, theatres or anywhere else, with any man who happens to ask them, and without even so much as a girl-companion, yet see nothing but impropriety in their desire to attend college where there is strict discipline and limited opportunities for flirting.

Like Mrs. Elwood in Cousin Mary and the well-meaning, but ineffectual Queen in The Unhappy Princess, Kate’s mother represents a generation of women who are unable to understand their daughters’ aspirations and actively oppose them, clinging to the common belief that educated women are useless, alienating to men, and unsuited for their proper sphere. Indeed, Kate’s mother maintains that "women do not need so much education as men, and ought to keep themselves to themselves, and not put themselves forward like impudent minxes. In addition, she questions the usefulness of learning mathyphysics and metamatics and classical history, and such stuff as unfits a woman for her place, since it makes her ignorant" of running a household.

Curzon’s play concludes with an allusion to the campaign of the Toronto Women’s Literary Club, of which she was a founding member. Kate tells everyone: Let every man and woman here to-night / Look out for those petitions that will soon / Be placed in many a store by those our friends / Who in this city form a ladies’ club.¹³ In 1884, less than two years after the publication of The Sweet Girl Graduate, women were finally allowed to attend classes at Toronto University.¹⁴ Curzon supported herself after her husband’s death in 1878 by publishing verse, essays, and fiction in journals and by editing a Woman’s Page in the Canada Citizen. She also campaigned for women’s suffrage and their right to own property. She celebrated Canadian women’s history through such works as her best-known play, the poetic drama Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812, published in 1887.

Looking at The Unhappy Princess, it is clear that Amy Levy echoes Charlotte Perkins Gilman on the value of useful work. Levy, the first Jewish woman to be admitted to Newnham College, is personified in this play by the governess, Girtonia—a sly reference to Girton, Newnham’s rival women’s college at Cambridge. However, formal education is not the primary solution for Morosa, the miserable young woman in Levy’s fairy tale. When the spoiled princess sighs and expresses unhappiness, the Queen, as palliatives to her daughter’s discontent, offers only objects (including a slave) that infantilize her:

Come poppet, sit on mammy’s knee,

And tell her all your misery.

What would you have? A doll? a sweet?

A little slave to pet or beat?

A pony, or a new pink dress?

To drive away this dull distress.¹⁵

Morosa remains essentially disenchanted with life; nothing will appease her unhappiness—not food, drink, amusement, or anything else suggested by King, Queen, and court physician. Wise Woman, finding her alone and bemoaning her state, transports Morosa by magic to her castle where the young woman becomes occupied with spinning, hoeing in the garden, feeding the chickens, milking the cow, and cooking. Pleased, Wise Woman comments: My daughter, all your industry, / A useful being yet you’ll grow, / You—who last month could scarcely sew; / You haven’t even time to sigh! In her new role as servant, Morosa attracts the attention of Felix, Prince of Honeyland, who is dressed as a huntsman and to whom she is, in fact, betrothed, though they have never met; indeed, he rapidly becomes enthralled by the pretty cook. Later, the lovers are reunited as their true selves when Wise Woman returns the reformed Morosa to the castle on their wedding day. Wise Woman lays the blame for the girl’s previous unhappiness upon the Queen: You foolish mother, foolish wife, / Had nearly wreck’d your daughter’s life. / Unwise indulgence is not kind— / It ruins heart and soul and mind.… Her parting words to Morosa are to Learn that nothing can happy be / that does not labour. The play suggests an underlying concern on the part of the author toward those girls who are entrapped within a world of material pleasures that excludes useful endeavor. Although Levy produced a significant number of poems, essays, and novels, she struggled with constraints imposed upon her as a respectable young Jewish woman in a conservative and repressive society—also satirized in her novel Reuben Sachs published in 1888.¹⁶

Like Morosa, Clara in Catherine Dawson-Scott’s Cousin Mary is a restless young woman dealing with the demands of female respectability and complains of having no useful occupation; she is sick of mending gloves and wants to do something that is real. Later in the play she declares to her Cousin Mary: Pinch and screw and scrape in order to keep up appearances—oh, the life of a poor and incompetent lady! Mary, if only—if only I could do some honest work, if only I might be trained to earn my own living.¹⁷ Clara’s mother, Mrs. Elwood, despite a limited income, strives to raise her three daughters to be, first and foremost, ladies, who would be able to take their place in any society as well-bred and accomplished girls, the sort of girls that a man would be proud to marry. Her plans are interrupted by the arrival of her niece from Australia—the joke of the piece being that Cousin Mary gets mistaken for the governess, who has been hired to teach the girls music, dancing, drawing, singing, French and German … all that a young lady requires to know. Instead, Mary imparts far more useful knowledge to her three cousins and provides them with a new role model. Indeed, Mary not only knows the latest waltz and can make a meal but also demonstrates that as a medical student she is used to roughing it and is on her way to being self-supporting. What is more, Mary reveals that her father (Mrs. Elwood’s conservative cousin who emigrated to Australia) now endorses the view that every woman ought to be able to support herself. That her cousin would let his daughter study medicine gives Mrs. Elwood a new perspective, thereby providing hope for her daughters.¹⁸ Written when Dawson-Scott’s children were young, the play is one of several that echos the strong feminist themes found in her better-known novels and poems.¹⁹ As so often occurs with plays, they are forgotten by her biographer, who leaves them out of her bibliography.²⁰ Dawson-Scott’s own useful work included the founding of PEN International (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, Novelists) for which she worked indefatigably … from 1921 until 1933.²¹

By the late-nineteenth century, a demographic surplus of women relative to men led to an increasing recognition that many middle-class women could not hope to marry and be maintained by a husband, but would need to be self-supporting and, like working-class women always had, join the labor market. This subject is dealt with in numerous plays by women, from light to serious in tone; several pieces in this section dramatize challenges of the working world for women—as kindergartner (nursery-school teacher), typist, shop assistant, actress, and telephone operator. Some depict the loneliness encountered by women in the working world, while others show stress in relationships created by outside employment. This latter theme appears in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Three Women, in which Aline Morrow, a kindergartner, not only loves teaching young children but excels at it; indeed, her aunt describes Aline as an artist in her line—a real one.²² Aline’s predicament is that while she loves her work, she also loves Gordon Russell, a physician who wants her to marry him and give up her work. Aline talks with her mother, who is adamant when she says: DON’T GIVE UP YOUR PROFESSION FOR THE BEST MAN ON EARTH! Mrs. Morrow reveals that as a young singer, she gave up music for love. Although she loved her husband and children, there was always this great empty place that made her regret her decision. Gilman provides an opposing argument through Aline’s aunt, Miss Upton, a vivacious, richly dressed artist of some renown who never married. Her immediate response to Aline when told that Dr. Russell’s condition is to give up her work? Then do it! Do it in a minute! Drop it once and for all. Forswear it; forget it—and thank God for a good man’s love. Miss Upton reveals that while everyone assumes she is happy in her success, she always regretted choosing her profession over her lover twenty years earlier. Aline, however, does not accept either argument. She appears before Gordon in ultra-feminine mode, beautifully done up in a white, misty, clinging, shimmering gown with an elusive sparkle, yet insists that she cannot accept him without remaining a teacher. The man is torn between her feminine attractions and her feminist stance: If I shut my eyes I seem to hear the New Woman laying down the law. If I open them—Lilith couldn’t be lovelier. Aline asserts that they are merely different aspects of the same woman. In the end, Gordon agrees to her terms. Aline may have solved her dilemma through using feminine wiles, but her actions contrast with with the lifestyle of the playwright. Indeed, Charlotte Perkins Gilman rejected marriage for herself and rendered enforced feminine passivity as madness in her famous and much-taught story, The Yellow Wallpaper. She agreed that her child be raised by her husband in order to pursue a career as social reformer and utopian feminist; her impressive literary achievements and her lifestyle, unorthodox at the time, have made her a role model for succeeding generations of feminists.

The loneliness of women forced by economic circumstances to choose between a less-than-fulfilling relationship and a tedious job is central to Netta Syrett’s touching The Finding of Nancy.²³ After winning a competition for new writers, the play was produced in 1902 at the St. James Theatre, London. It garnered high praise from influential critic Max Beerbohm, who discusses the position of the ignorant poor and of those well-bred and well-educated young women who by poverty are compelled to spend their lives in some kind of unattractive drudgery. These are the women for whom Syrett speaks in The Finding of Nancy, Beerbohm asserts, and in my time there has been nothing on the stage so interesting, so impressive, so poignant, as the first act of Miss Syrett’s play.²⁴ J. T. Grein, another major contemporary critic, also praises the first act as worthy of a master, stating that Syrett had three of the basic requisites of a dramatist: the gifts of dramatic instinct, writing dialogue and moulding characters.²⁵ Because of such critical praise, the appropriate subject matter, and its ability to stand alone as a one-act, the first act of The Finding of Nancy is included here.

Nancy, a typewriter living in rented rooms in London, and her long-time friend, Isabel, an art teacher, are in their late twenties, apparently fulfilling the same dream as Dawson-Scott’s Clara: being self-supporting. Syrett exposes the reality behind that dream. Isabel, who works in the Manchester Art Schools, describes standing on her feet all day and then going home to the boredom of living in a dormitory with students. Nancy, meanwhile, often works late hours and takes home extra assignments to supplement her eighty pounds a year. Isabel’s brief visit is the first time the women have met since leaving Streamford, their hometown, because they have limited holidays and scant funds to travel. Even enjoyment of London’s cultural possibilities is constrained by lack of spending money and a limited social circle; as Nancy describes:

Sometimes I go to the theatre, with one of the girls at the Office. But waiting at the Pit door after a hard day’s work is not exhilarating, is it? Friends? Well! there are the other women at the office, poor and friendless like me. Some of them are pleasant, a few of them are ladies. None of them interest me. One or two of them come occasionally, but most evenings I am alone (6).

But then Nancy admits that she has been seeing a Mr. Fielding, who, although separated from his wife for ten years, is still married; she reveals her acceptance of Fielding’s offers of theatre tickets and visits to galleries, as well as their growing friendship. Isabel, disturbed by Nancy’s flippancy, is clearly torn between concern for her friend and a need to remind her of the moral judgment that society will make of her behavior. Yet, Isabel expresses her own fear that nothing will happen as she grows older:

I think of all of the glorious places in the world I shall never see. I think of all the people, the dear charming, interesting people I shall never know. I see life with all its colour and glitter sweeping on without me like some great full river, while I am caught in a little stagnant backwater, held fast by the weeds (7).

After Isabel departs, Fielding arrives at Nancy’s apartment, returning from a six-month trip to Vienna, and presents her with an ultimatum: to live with him as his lover or to return to her solitary life. Syrett does not present Fielding as the conventional great love of Nancy’s life, which makes Nancy’s acceptance of his proposal all the more poignant. Critics responded powerfully to Syrett’s appeal against the mundane drudgery of the workaday world, one she experienced herself—she and her sisters inhabited a world of shared flats, with young women struggling to survive independently.

While Syrett’s play gives her heroine a choice that allows her to escape from a narrow existence, albeit at the cost of respectability, Elizabeth Baker’s Miss Tassey resonates with a sense of futility for the older working woman.²⁶ It was produced at the Royal Court in London in 1910 following the previous season’s success of Baker’s Chains, which depicted a man tied to the drudgery of clerking to maintain his wife in narrow respectability.