Non-Fiction

The Female Wits

Virago
One of Virago's earliest historical non fiction works

The Female Wits is a thick large format book consisting of biographies & playtexts of 17th & 18th century women. When Fidelis wrote this book there was nowhere else where you could read the works of these "lost" women, unless you went to the British Library special collection, where many of them were kept under strict supervision as they had been classified as obscene when first catalogued.

The idea for the book came from two original research projects Fidelis had done at university: A practical study of the first staging of Congreve's The Way of the World at Lincoln's Inn in 1700, and her dissertation on Acting and Society in Restoration London.

When Fidelis was doing the research for The Female Wits, computers still took up a large room, so there was no question of using a laptop. The original plays were too fragile to photocopy, too precious to be let out of the reading room into the typing area. As a result this book was a real labour of love - the plays had to be copied out in pencil and then the notes typed up each evening at home.

There are two editions. In the first printing Fidelis accepted the acknowledged accuracy of the biographers in venerated works like The Dictionary of National Biography. Once Fidelis had written A Woman of No Character she realised no secondary scholarship should be believed, and looked again, using only primary sources. She unearthed several further facts about the lives of the female playwrights, both for the second printing and a later book Female Playwrights of the Restoration

Lively and persuasive...a useful interesting book. Harpers & Queen

Overdue and delightful resurrection of women playwrights of the Restoration. The Times

A bold attempt to assert an alternative tradition to the accepted canon...of late seventeenth century plays.New Society

A useful book in a very handy paperback format. The Daily Telegraph

It is not often that one book is responsible for so much theatrical pleasure. Times Literary Supplement

Together with 3 actresses (from a pool which includes Celia Imrie, Michele Wade, Rosalind Knight, Jane Wymark, Jill Benedict, Pauline Moran, Anne Lambton, Selina Cadell, Jane Nash and Hermione Gulliford), Fidelis performs a show based on The Female Wits. The show premiered as a Platform at the Royal National Theatre in 1992, with a cast of Fidelis, Celia Imrie, Rosalind Knight and Selina Cadell

A whirlwind theatrical tour through the lives and plays of the celebrated female playwrights of the late seventeenth century, a performance of The female Wits lasts anything from 45 minutes to an hour and a half (depending on the demands of the venue).

Since its first performance The Female Wits has played at:

• The Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadlers Wells
• The University of Utrecht
• and festivals in Amsterdam, Eastbourne, Birmingham, Chipping Norton, The Dordogne, Nottingham, Loughborough, Walton on Thames, Newark and Bodmin, and the British Library.

• University of Texas at Austin
• Stanford University
• Glasgow University
• Liverpool University
• the QEII and various other venues.

David Rees at dreeskon@aol.com or phone/fax 00 44 20 7702 2880

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