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.
- See British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, an Anthology, 2001, ed. by Paula R. Feldman. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press
The Women's Playhouse 