Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Michelene Wandor.
She has recently pursued interests in music, in the working out of Jewish identity, and in recasting work in different forms.
This was also performed in July the same year at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in London, and was adapted for broadcast on BBC Radio 4
on 23 November 1978 (after some thought of...
Anthologization
Pam Gems
The play was revived under the new title at London's Hampstead Theatre
in December of the same year.
Lloyd Evans, Gareth, and Barbara Lloyd-Evans, editors. Plays in Review, 1956-1980: British Drama and the Critics. Methuen, 1985.
221
Demastes, William W., editor. British Playwrights, 1956-1995. Greenwood Press, 1996.
160
It was published on its own in 1977, then reprinted in Methuen
's first...
Anthologization
Michèle Roberts
MR
contributed a short piece to Michelene Wandor
's On Gender and Writing, 1983, entitling it Questions and Answers. She said she didn't at first want this assignment, feeling that she'd said what...
Anthologization
Angela Carter
AC
contributed Notes from the Front Line to Michelene Wandor
's On Gender and Writing, 1983. It took her seven drafts.
Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 69 -77.
69
Anthologization
Fay Weldon
FW
's non-fiction has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Allure, Cosmopolitan, and the New York Times.
Barreca, Regina, editor. “Introduction”. Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions, University Press of New England, 1994, pp. 1 - 8.
3
For Michelene Wandor
's On Gender and Writing, 1983, she provided a...
Anthologization
Sara Maitland
The same year, 1983, SM
contributed to Michelene Wandor
's On Gender and Writing a slightly fey fairy-tale or allegory called A Feminist Writer's Progress, featuring herself as a little girl who sets out...
Family and Intimate relationships
Aemilia Lanyer
AL
's father, Baptista Bassano
, a Venetian musician who may have been of Jewish descent, had been working at the English court for nearly thirty years when she was born. He fell into poverty...
Friends, Associates
Michèle Roberts
MR
's memoir, Paper Houses, features a huge roster of close friends warmly evoked, some of them long-term commitments and others belonging to some particular period of her life. They include many women who...
Fairbairns, Zoë, Sara Maitland, Valerie Miner, Michèle Roberts, and Michelene Wandor, editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1978.
1-3
Literary responses
Louise Page
Michelene Wandor
, this play's first editor, noted its fluid, urgent pace and its darting, daring time-chopping structure.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. “Introduction”. Plays by Women: Volume One, Methuen, 1982, pp. 7 - 14.
13
Elaine Turner
in Contemporary Dramatists remarked how LP
had used her painful topic to explore the...
Literary responses
Pam Gems
This play brought PG
's work to the attention of critics and playgoers alike. While reviews were generally quite positive, some had difficulty accepting the play's feminist perspective. For instance, Ted Whitehead
in The Spectator...
Literary responses
Pam Gems
Although the play seemed to be well received during the previews, it received a bad press on opening night.
Gems, Pam. “Putting on the Style”. Plays by Women: Volume Three, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1984, pp. 47 - 8.
47
In his review for Plays and Players, Charles Spencer
described it as an intense...
Literary responses
Caryl Churchill
Michelene Wandor
called this play bleak, ambiguous, murky in its implications as well as its imagery and its action,redolent with imagery of death, disintegrating flesh and destruction.
English-speaking critics are divided on the play's politics. Margaret Llewellyn-Jones
thought it ideologically somewhat questionable in the way that it combines Brechtian distancing techniques with encouragement for the audience to cheer during the wrestling matches,...
Literary responses
Caryl Churchill
CC
has been recognised in Britain and the US with several major awards for play writing. As early as 1961, she won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize at Oxford University
. New York productions of...
Timeline
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 on the English stage, by John Dryden
and Sir Robert Howard
, opened in London.
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.
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.
