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 Judith Kazantzis
JK contributed to On Gender and Writing (edited by Michelene Wandor , 1983) an essay entitled The Errant Unicorn.
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...
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
Literary responses Claire Luckham
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,...
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 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.
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...
Literary responses Grace Nichols
GN 's publishers quote glowing opinions about her work. Gwendolyn Brooks has praised her rich music, an easy lyricism . . . also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean,Jeanette Winterson
Material Conditions of Writing Louise Page
It was when she contacted the Arts Lab about some royalties for this play that they commissioned her for what became Tissue.
Page, Louise. “Tissue”. Plays by Women: Volume One, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, pp. 75-103.
100
Michelene Wandor names LP as one of the women playwrights who...
Anthologization Louise Page
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...
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, pp. 7-14.
13
Elaine Turner in Contemporary Dramatists remarked how LP had used her painful topic to explore the...
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...
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...
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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Wandor, Michelene, editor. Plays by Women: Volume One. Methuen, 1982.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. Plays by Women: Volume Three. Methuen, 1984.
Wandor, Michelene. Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender. Routledge, 2001.
Gems, Pam. “Putting on the Style”. Plays by Women: Volume Three, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1984, pp. 47-8.
Roberts, Michèle. “Questions and Answers”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 62-8.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. Strike While the Iron is Hot. Journeyman Press, 1980.
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1978.
Wandor, Michelene. The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Wandor, Michelene. The Body Politic. Stage 1, 1972.
Shuttle, Penelope. “The Dialogue of Gender”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 141-7.
Kazantzis, Judith. “The Errant Unicorn”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 24-30.
Wandor, Michelene. The Music of the Prophets. Arc Publications, 2006.
Wandor, Michelene, and Mike Alfreds. The Wandering Jew. Methuen, 1987.
Page, Louise. “Tissue”. Plays by Women: Volume One, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1982, pp. 75-103.
Wandor, Michelene. “To Die Among Friends”. Sink Songs, edited by Dinah Brooke and Michelene Wandor, published by the authors, 1975.
Kazantzis, Judith et al. Touch Papers. Allison and Busby, 1982.
Luckham, Claire. “Trafford Tanzi”. Plays by Women: Volume Two, edited by Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1983, pp. 77-97.
Wandor, Michelene. Understudies. Methuen, 1981.
Wandor, Michelene. Upbeat. Journeyman Press, 1982.
Stott, Mary. “Women in Newspapers”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 126-32.
Wandor, Michelene. “Women playwrights and the challenge of feminism in the 1970s”. Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 53-68.