Abstract:
"In spite of their presence everywhere as the defining object of modern plays, women seemed to have disappeared as writing subjects in the modern theater,” claims scholar Katherine E. Kelly, who defines as the “ghost effect” the fact that women playwrights hardly ever appear in anthologies and collections of modern drama.1 This absence is not caused by the fact that women did not write for the theater, Kelly explains, but that “the vast majority of plays by women—particularly those with a major part written for a woman—either failed to be produced or else appeared in theaters that would bring them neither profit nor acclaim.”