Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage

Scott, Angela, The Modern Language Review

Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. By MISTY G. ANDERSON. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. X+ 262 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-312-23938.

Misty Anderson offers close readings of the popular comedies of Behn, Centlivre, Cowley, and Inchbald, tracing their comic strategies as they respond to changes in marriage law. She draws attention to the inconsistency between comic events manipulated by the heroines and comedy's final closure of marriage, in which the identity of women is subsumed into that of their husbands. Feminist criticism has found comedy a rich source for the exposure of inequities in the lives of women, and Anderson's work complements Audrey Bilger's examination of female comedy in the novels of Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen (Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State University …

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Publication information: Article title: Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. Contributors: Scott, Angela - Author. Journal title: The Modern Language Review. Volume: 99. Issue: 1 Publication date: January 2004. Page number: 170+. © 2008 Modern Humanities Research Association. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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