Madeleine Lucette Ryley

MLR 's brief career as a dramatist (which she turned to because it enabled a more settled life than acting) spanned only about seventeen years, from 1890 to 1907. She began with hack work, revising opera librettos and writing magazine fiction and sketches. Her theatrical writings, especially at first, were tailored for American as much as British audiences. Her usual genre was romantic comedy peopled with stereotypes, in which ingenious, convoluted, and implausible obstacles trouble the course of entirely predictable true love. MLR also tried her hand at serious and historical plays and at comic operas. She once had three plays running in New York Cityat once, which was at the time the record for a woman.