Hundreds of women writers wrote for the British stage in the nineteenth-century, but their works have become invisible in the history of the theatre. In this first full-length study of Victorian women playwrights in Britain, Katherine Newey uncovers these invisible women playwrights, to find an energetic tradition of female playwriting that dramatizes the central experiences of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, marriage and the family. Women playwrights are revealed in all their diversity - ambitious, playful, tragic, comic, popular, hard working - and in their strength of purpose in the face of the masculine, clubbable Victorian theatre. Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain shows that it was possible to be a playwright and a woman in Victorian Britain, and argues that it is important that we remember the women who struggled so hard for recognition on the national stage. Featuring extensive use of archival work and a useful appendix with a checklist of British women playwrights and their plays 1800 - 1900, this new study will be valuable to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian studies and gender and performance.