True Women in the Nordic Theatre Landscape- Dissemination and Reception of a Female Playwright's Gender Criticism in the Modern Breakthrough

We know a lot about the Nordic dissemination and reception of Henrik Ibsen's and August Strindberg's modern breakthrough plays, but less about the dissemination and reception of the plays of their female colleagues. Works on the history of Swedish literature and theatre give a picture of how female playwrights entered the Nordic theatres on a broad front in the early 1880s with drama critical of gender and marriage, but that the plays soon lost their relevance. By going back to the archives and including previously unexplored material and from new historiographical starting points, this picture is both questioned and supplemented. The research is based on Anne-Charlotte Leffler's play True Women (1883) and maps and analyses its distribution in the Nordic theatres and its reception by critics during the period 1883 - 1825.