Historically revealing : a cultural analysis of four recovered plays by Irish women, 1900-1925

Abstract

This thesis concerns the retrieval and analysis of four plays written in two distinct collaborative configurations by early twentieth-century Irish women, Geraldine Cummins (1890-1968), Susanne Day (1876-1964) and Hester Travers Smith (née Dowden 1869-1949). The focus on these previously un-critiqued playwrights emerged from consideration of 28 plays and associated material uncovered in the ‘Geraldine Cummins Collection’ in the Cork City & County Archives. The project takes a multi-disciplinary feminist approach using a four-chapter structure to examine the paired collaborations of Cummins and Day, and of Dowden and Cummins; their contribution to the emergent Irish theatre movement and the relation of their work to Irish cultural and feminist discourses.