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
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, pp. 69-77.
69
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.
Wandor, Michelene. Understudies. Methuen.
66
Amelia Howe Kritzer has described its...
Performance of text Caryl Churchill
CC 's collaboration with Monstrous Regiment continued through the summer of 1977, when she participated in their cabaret Floorshow, along with Michelene Wandor and Bryony Lavery .
Churchill, Caryl. Plays: One. Methuen.
xii
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...
Literary responses Sarah Daniels
Feminist playwright and critic Michelene Wandor has asserted that the play's form—the action couched in dramatic realism interrupted by monologues and polemical speeches—has a detrimental effect on its feminist message. She feels that the momentary...
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 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...
Friends, Associates Zoë Fairbairns
ZF formed a feminist collective with fellow writers and socialists Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michèle Roberts , and Michelene Wandor .
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman.
1-3
Textual Production Zoë Fairbairns
The first project of the feminist collective formed by ZF with Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michele Roberts , and Michelene Wandor was to write and publish Tales I Tell My Mother.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
(1988)
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman.
1-3
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...
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.
221
Demastes, William W., editor. British Playwrights, 1956-1995. Greenwood Press.
160
It was published on its own in 1977, then reprinted in Methuen 's first...
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...
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...
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, pp. 47-8.
47
In his review for Plays and Players, Charles Spencer described it as an intense...
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...

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.