Genre and gender intersect in nineteenth-century melodrama, and melodrama became an important vehicle for thinking about gender in the period. This chapter argues that melodrama is, in all the media of its expression (drama, fiction, and latterly, film) about gender, and reveals the contradictions of gender ideology through heightened modes of performance. The chapter explores the representation of gender roles and social constructions of femininity and masculinity, in well-known domestic and nautical melodramas by Douglas Jerrold and John Thomas Haines. It then goes on to examine the career of Mrs Denvil, a playwright for several East End theatres in the 1840s. Mrs Denvil is an example of the mixed economy of the theatre industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, which was part familial and part commercial. Her work as an adapter of the cheap novels known as ‘penny dreadfuls’ was satirised in Punch, but appreciated in the theatres which staged her work. She is an example of the ways in which women writers of melodrama and sensation put female feeling, action, and agency at the centre of melodramatic texts in theatre, the novel, and (later) in film.