Despite arguments that playwriting was beyond their intellectual and linguistic capabilities, women are identifiable as the authors of hundreds of plays staged in London theatres in Victoria's reign. Most of these dramas were never published, however, and none has penetrated the literary or dramatic canon; none of their titles and few of their authors are familiar today. It seems certain, moreover, that a vast, additional number of plays by women was never produced at all, often because their works failed to serve the interests of managers, usually men, who controlled the selection and casting of works for the stage.

Many dramas written by women will always be veiled in anonymity, or disguised by a male pseudonym. As Virginia Woolf speculated about an imagined “sister” of Shakespeare in A Room of One's Own: “Undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly.” Even near the end of the Victorian period, Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins kept their joint authorship of Alan's Wife, staged by the Independent Theatre, a closely guarded secret; the talented Harriett Jay wrote as “Charles Marlowe”; Constance Fletcher renamed herself “George Fleming,” and Pearl Marie Craigie was known as “John Oliver Hobbes.”