Michelene Wandor

Standard Name: Wandor, Michelene
Birth Name: Michelene Dinah Samuels
Self-constructed Name: Michelene Wandor
Married Name: Michelene Victor
MW is a prolific twentieth-century and contemporary writer of stage plays, radio drama, short stories, poetry, reviews, theatre criticism, and a co-authored novel. A passionate feminist, she became an energetic force in alternative theatre in Britain in the 1970s, involving herself in radical theatre groups in various capacities, including that of playwright. Since then she has been a frequent radio writer, often adapting novels, especially by women, for radio. Apart from her high profile in radio drama and broadcasting, and the warm reception of her recent poetry publications, her editorial work has made a lasting contributio: the first anthology of the British women's liberation movement, The Body Politic, 1972, as well as volumes of women's plays.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Michelene Wandor. http://www.mwandor.co.uk/.
She has recently pursued interests in music, in the working out of Jewish identity, and in recasting work in different forms.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Zoë Fairbairns
The series was to include writers from the US as well as the UK. The first batch of four volumes (all with cover illustrations by Anita Klein ) bracketed Fairbairns with two of her former...
Textual Production Alison Fell
AF was a constant source of scenes, burlesques, and improvisations for performance by the Women's Liberation Street Theatre Group . She also wrote for a number of underground or radical papers: Ink, Islington Gutter...
Textual Production Michèle Roberts
After working on several other collective anthologies, MR joined forces with Judith Kazantzis and Michelene Wandor in another poetry volume, Touch Papers.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production Pam Gems
The play's development was influenced by another project PG was working on at the time, a translation of Uncle Vanya. Her own play, she explains, was much influenced by Chekhov , I had tried...
Textual Production Michèle Roberts
MR 's work with Spare Rib won her an invitation to join the writing-editing collective of Zoë Fairbairns , Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , and Michelene Wandor (who were already published authors), working on...
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
The collaborative Touch Papers, September 1982, included poems by JK , many of which had appeared already in such places as Spare Rib, Ambit, Tribune, Samphire, New Poetry, and—this...
Textual Production Michèle Roberts
MR was writing poetry seriously from the period of working on her first novel.
Roberts, Michèle. Paper Houses. Virago.
141
In the era of collectives she helped to produce the feminist verse anthologies Cutlasses & Earrings, 1977 (with Michelene Wandor
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
JK contributed to On Gender and Writing (edited by Michelene Wandor , 1983) an essay entitled The Errant Unicorn.
Textual Production Penelope Shuttle
Shuttle and Redgrove contributed jointly to Michelene Wandor 's On Gender and Writing, 1983. Their contribution takes the form, unique in the volume, of a dialogue with Wandor in which the couple speak in unison.
Textual Production Bryony Lavery
BL collaborated with Caryl Churchill and Michelene Wandor in a cabaret entitled Floorshow, written for Monstrous Regiment .
Churchill, Caryl. Plays: One. Methuen.
xii
Textual Production Mary Stott
An essay that MS contributed to Michelene Wandor 's On Gender and Writing, 1983, provides a trenchant summary of a depressing history.
Stott, Mary. “Women in Newspapers”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, pp. 126-32.
126
Textual Production Sara Maitland
Zoë Fairbairns , Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor together edited a volume of feminist fiction entitled Tales I Tell My Mother.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
(1988)
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production Sara Maitland
Zoë Fairbairns , Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor together edited a collection looking back more than a decade: More Tales I Tell My Mother.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
(1988)
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production Margaret Drabble
In a brief essay written in 1973 and reprinted a decade later by Michelene Wandor in On Gender and Writing, MD said that she had already thought so much about being a woman writer...
Textual Production Sara Maitland
SM and Michelene Wandor collaborated on an absurdist epistolary novel entitled Arky Types.
Duguid, Lindsay. “Cinderella’s Walkman”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4412, p. 1158.
1158
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

Timeline

1290: King Edward I expelled all remaining Jews...

Building item

1290

King Edward I expelled all remaining Jews from England. According to Michelene Wandor 's The Music of the Prophets, they were to be gone by All Saints' Day, November the first.

16 January 1664: The Indian Queen, the first heroic tragedy...

Writing climate item

16 January 1664

The Indian Queen, the first heroic tragedy on the English stage, by John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard , opened in London.

August 1972: Red Rag: A Magazine of Women's Liberation,...

Building item

August 1972

Red Rag: A Magazine of Women's Liberation, produced by a Marxist collective of the Women's Liberation Movement, began quarterly publication in London.

About October 1973: The Women's Theatre Group (still in being...

Women writers item

About October 1973

The Women's Theatre Group (still in being as the Sphinx Theatre Company ) was founded in London as a feminist and socialist theatre group; its twin organization the Women's Theatre Company proved short-lived.

19 August 1977: The comedy Once a Catholic by Mary O'Malley...

Women writers item

19 August 1977

The comedyOnce a Catholic by Mary O'Malley opened at the Royal Court Theatre ; it transferred to the West End later this year and won a string of awards.

Texts

Wandor, Michelene. “‘Will the Hebrew turn Christian?’: Jewishness, Identity and Cultural Appropriation”. Figures of Heresy, edited by Andrew Dix and Jonathan Taylor, Sussex Academic Press, 2006, pp. 243-60.
Maitland, Sara. “A Feminist Writer’s Progress”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 17-23.
Drabble, Margaret. “A Woman Writer”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 156-9.
Gems, Pam. “Afterword to ’Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi’”. Plays by Women: Volume One, edited by Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1982, pp. 71-3.
Maitland, Sara, and Michelene Wandor. Arky Types. Methuen, 1987.
Figes, Eva. “Art and Reason”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 152-5.
Gems, Pam. “Aunt Mary”. Plays by Women: Volume Three, edited by Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1984, pp. 13-46.
Wandor, Michelene. “Care and Control”. Strike While the Iron is Hot, edited by Michelene Wandor, Journeyman Press, 1980.
Wandor, Michelene. Carry On, Understudies. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
Wandor, Michelene, and Michèle Roberts, editors. Cutlasses & Earrings. Playbooks, 1977.
Wandor, Michelene. Email to Orlando.
Wandor, Michelene. False Relations. Five Leaves, 2004.
Wandor, Michelene. Five Plays. Journeyman, 1984.
Wandor, Michelene. Gardens of Eden. Journeyman, 1984.
Wandor, Michelene. Guests in the Body. Virago, 1986.
Gems, Pam. “Imagination and Gender”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 148-51.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. “Introduction”. Plays by Women: Volume One, Methuen, 1982, pp. 7-14.
Wandor, Michelene. Look Back in Gender. Methuen, 1987.
Weldon, Fay. “Me and My Shadows”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 160-5.
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. More Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1987.
Wandor, Michelene. Musica Transalpina. Arc Publications, 2006.
Wandor, Michelene. Natural Chemistry. Arc Publications, 2013.
Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 69-77.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. On Gender and Writing. Pandora Press, 1983.
Wandor, Michelene. Once a Feminist. Virago, 1990.