I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
A quotation from Virginia Woolf to introduce the women of Well Thumbed. Some of our finest Well Thumbed texts were written by some of the world’s greatest authoresses. Most of them thoroughly respectable women by the conventions of their times.
Meet Jane Austen, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Frances Trollope. There are no potted biographies here, just first impressions. Oh, and one of them published under a male non de plume.
Can you match the faces to the names?
They are each an important part of Notional Theatre’s excursion into the Well Thumbed dirty bits of immortal authors.
- Alas and alack! – now that has an classic ring to it – the majority of our immortal authors are good and dead. And the majority of them have been good and gone for more than the seventy years that copyright law requires.
Hence the full title for the show that has inspired these random jottings: Well Thumbed & well out of copyright. And that’s why we won’t be including the Well Thumbed joys of Agatha Christie for instance.
- When can we see the show?
- Good question. Glad you asked. The plan, the anticipation is a Well Thumbed 2017, fingers crossed. That’s why it’s launching in September 2016. To get the word out.
- Where can we expect to be Well Thumbed?
- Notional Theatre is a Wales-based company so, naturally, at Chapter Arts in Cardiff on 28th September 2016. Then two nights later, that’s on the 30th, in Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway, at the Wigtown Book Festival. We’ll see where we go from there.
Virginia Woolf, immortal and eligible, is not quoted in Well Thumbed. Here is her picture. & then a perfectly Well Thumbed quote from her to round things off.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
NoTIONAL THEATRE 