Covering a diverse range of subject matter, many of these plays are published in English for the first time.

Includes:

The Savage Season (Le Temps sauvage) by Anne Hébert, translated by Pamela Grant and Gregory Reid
Playing Double (Double jeu) by Françoise Loranger, translated by Louise H. Forsyth
Mine Sincerely (Bien à moi) by Marie Savard, translated by Louise H. Forsyth
Evangeline the Second (Evangéline deusse) by Antonine Maillet, translated by Luis de Céspedes
The Ocean (L’Océan) by Marie-Claire Blais, translated by Ray Chamberlain
A Clash of Symbols (La Nef des sorcières) by Marthe Blackburn, Marie-Claire Blais, Nicole Brossard, Odette Gagnon, Luce Guilbeault, Pol Pelletier, France Théoret; translated by Linda Gaboriau
The Fairies Are Thirsty (Les Fées ont soif) by Denise Boucher, translated by Alan Brown
Mommy (Moman) by Louisette Dussault, translated by Linda Gaboriau
The Edge of Earth is Too Near, Violette Leduc (La Terre est trop courte, Violette Leduc) by Jovette Marchessault, translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
Night (L’Homme gris) by Marie Laberge, translated by Rina Fraticelli
Marie-Antoine, Opus One (Marie-Antoine, Opus 1) by Lise Vaillancourt, translated by Jill Mac Dougall

Louise H. Forsyth has always loved performance and theatre. As an amateur lover of the stage, she has acted, sung, danced, written, directed, produced, translated, stage managed, served as props manager, and hung out as much as she could as spectator. Woven into an amateur obsession with theatre has been her professional life, where she wrote two theses on the classic French writer of theatrical comedy, Molière, taught courses and supervised theses in theatre, drama, and dramatic literature, wrote scholarly studies about French and Québec playwrights, and theorized about acting and dramatic writing. Her areas of academic specialization are feminist performance and dramaturgy in Québec. Along with her passion for what the women of Québec have written for theatre, she has been engaged for quite some time with developing theories of dramaturgy and acting au féminin, along with revealing the sources of tenacious sexism in the practices and conventions for doing theatre, for studying and evaluating it, and for recounting its history. In short, she has been wondering for quite some time why womenâ??s roles have tended to remain stereotypical in works for stage, TV and film, why theatre done by womenâ??when its perspective is explicitly derived from a womanâ??s point of viewâ??is still easily dismissed with a summary shrug as deserving only condescending scorn, why womenâ??s theatrical experimentation is so rarely discussed by scholars as serious theoretical work or used by them in their own theoretical reflections, and why the silence of critics on women and their richly creative activities has not yet been overcome when it comes to their accounts of theatre history.

Louise H. Forsyth's profile page

"This first volume of Louise Forsyth's Anthology of Quebec Women's Plays is a valuable contribution in itself to the study of Quebec theatre and to understanding the role that women and feminism have played in transforming it during the first two decades of the Theatre-femmes movement in Quebec. Anglophone scholars will appreciate Forsyth's selection of important and ground-breaking works, as well as the bibliographical materials, thoughtful analyses of the plays, and pertinent biographical notes. This is a gem of a collection edited by a distinguished scholar who has not only studied but also written, theorized on, and experienced firsthand every aspect of Quebec dramaturgy along with the women authors whose struggles and triumphs fill the pages of this volume." —Celita Lamar, The American Review of Canadian Studies