Plays By Women, Vol. 1 »

Michelene Wandor is the author of Understudies, published in 1980. She has been Poetry Editor and a regular theatre reviewer for Time Out since 1971 and has also written on theatre for Spare Rib, Plays and Players and The Morning Star. Since 1970 she has been writing poetry and plays of her own - for theatre, radio and television - often in close collaboration with feminist and gay theatre groups, such as Monstrous Regiment. She has also compiled an anthology of British Women's Liberation writings, The Body Politic (1972), edited a collection of feminist plays, Strike While the Iron is Hot (1980) and contributed to a collection of feminist short stories, Tales I Tell My Mother (1978).

Included in this volume are Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom, about witchcraft in the seventeenth century; Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, an account of the lives of four young women by Pam Gems; Louise Page's Tissue, about breast cancer; and Aurora Leigh, adapted by Michelene Wandor herself from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel. Each play has an afterword by its author, and the volume opens with an introduction by the editor.