Author, translator, and theatre manager Frances Brooke (1724-1789) has a crater on Venus named after her. ‘Brooke’ has a diameter of 22.9 km, and is located at 48.4°N 63.4°W.
Other craters on Venus are named after poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, journalist Nellie Bly, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn, and Anne Boleyn, so she’s in good company.
Hannah Cowley was attending the theatre, and remarked about the play, ‘Why, I could write as well myself.’ Her husband laughed at this, and in response she wrote her first play The Runaway. It was written and sent off to David Garrick within a couple of weeks, and staged at Drury Lane in 1776, running for seventeen performances.
Sophia Lee (1750-1824) started writing while visiting her father in debtors’ prison. John Lee, an actor, was frequently in debt and struggled to support his family. Sophia’s play The Chapter of Accidents was performed in 1780, and her income enabled her to open a school for girls.
After giving up playwriting, Mariana Starke (1761/2 – 1838) became a renowned travel writer, publishing Letters from Italy between the Years 1792 and 1798, containing a View of the Revolutions in that Country in 1800, followed by Travels on the Continent (1820) and Travels in Europe (1828). She used a system of exclamation marks (!!!) to rate the quality of recommended tourist attractions and hotels, a forerunner of today’s star rating system.
From 1773 to 1778, Frances Brooke and her friend, actress Mary Anne Yates, managed the King’s Theatre, also known as the Haymarket Opera House. This is the only instance (as far as we know) of an eighteenth-century London theatre being run by two women!
At the beginning of her theatrical career, Elizabeth Inchbald and her husband had such severe financial problems that they once stole turnips from a field in order to have dinner!
From her Memoirs: ‘at Brighton they several times went without either dinner or tea, and once went into the fields to eat turnips instead of dining, their funds were so very low’.
-Elizabeth Inchbald, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, Including her Familiar Correspondence with the Most Distinguished Persons of her Time, ed. by James Boaden (London: Bentley, 1833), p. 68.
The Women's Playhouse 