From Library Journal
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Criteria for selection include significant body of work, influence, professional staging, innovative approach, present availability of work in English, and critical review. While most playwrights covered are twentieth-century Americans, there is representation from all continents and from 1000 A.D. onward. The earliest is medieval dramatist Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim; the newest is Belgian Michele Fabien, born in 1970. The author does not intend to be exhaustive, but she does manage to include some fairly obscure folks, such as British dramatist Susanna Centlivre, author of The Busie Bodie (1709) and The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714), and Aldona Liobyte, born in Latvia in 1915. Well-known women such as Agatha Christie, Lorraine Hansberry, and Jean Kerr are included as well.
Entries are alphabetically arranged and vary from a quarter page to three pages. Approximately a quarter of the entries have portraits. Information includes personal history, contributions to the field, a selected list of plays and other works, and selected secondary materials. Some entries open with excerpts from plays. The writing is accessible^-clear and concise, not pedantic.
The book also includes a time line (with representative male playwrights interspersed), a supplemental index of other women playwrights, a bibliography, and a general index. Although the time line lists the nationality of each playwright, a separate nationality index would have been useful. The supplemental index lists 140 additional women who have "not yet created a sufficiently significant body of work" or for which the editor was unable to find sufficient information. Obviously, "significant body of work" refers to drama for the stage, since among these 140 women are Maya Angelou, Edna O'Brien, and Sonya Sanchez.
Many of the women covered here can be found elsewhere, but because it brings such a range of female dramatists together into a single volume, this resource should be a welcome addition in high-school, public, and academic libraries.
