"The innovative work of the Pioneer Players, a London-based theatre society founded in 1911 by Edith Craig, is explored here for the first time, drawing on original archive research and taking an interdisciplinary approach to women's involvement in theatre during the British women's suffrage movement. This book tests the claim that the Pioneer Players was a women's theatre and investigates in a literary context the Pioneer Players' relationship to the women's suffrage movement and to feminism.

Their support for women's writing for the stage led most notably to the translation and performance of a play by Hrotsvit, a tenth-century nun said to be the first female dramatist. In 1915 the society shifted its attention from the political to the aesthetic, from 'propaganda' plays and the 'feminist play of ideas' to formally unusual plays performed in translation. Their endeavour to prove that women could organise art theatre in Britain was successful."--BOOK JACKET.