Women’s Worlds

Four plays about communities of women. Includes Female Transport, British Beauty, Cocky’s Girls, and Massa. For purchasing details please see the Publications page.

Female Transport

Herded into their cell aboard the convict ship, the six women convicts have little idea of the harrowing six-month journey that lies in wait for them.

British Beauty

Sophie, a wild country girl grows up in deepest Sussex as the daughter of a gamekeeper, who is head of the household of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, women’s rights campaigner and, with Bessie Parkes, editor of The Englishwoman’s Journal. Barbara is a friend of Preraphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti who loves to visit her country home in Sussex. It just so happens that on a visit Rossetti one day decides to draw the wild Sophie.

Cocky’s Girls

With an elderly but powerful mother, his shrewd and industrious wife Alma, his glamorous production secretary Joan, and a talented daughter - not to mention Grace Kelly and those other famous blondes - is it any wonder Alfred Hitchcock made those films the way he did?

Massa

Arthur Munby worked for the Victorian Church Commission, but in his summer holidays he became a proto-sociologist, scouring England for examples of women working in hard, physical labour, the record of which is in his diaries and extraordinary photographs, particularly of the surface coalpit ‘lasses’ of Northern England. The strangeness of his hobby was compounded however by his 14-year clandestine affair with maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick, whom he eventually married. An unlikely social pairing, their relationship was modern for its time, and they were forced to separate but saw each other regularly into old age.