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Edith "Edy" Craig (1869-1947) caused a furor in English theatrical circles when it was announced that she would direct the 1907 American tour of her mother, Ellen Terry, the most beloved actress of the Victorian stage. Edy thus became the first woman stage-manager (director) on record, and her profound influence on a generation of British actors and directors-along with her predominance among the women leading England's suffragette theatres-makes her a pivotal figure in the transition period from the spectacle of the Victorian stage into the more complex theatre of the modern era. Although Edy's important achievements have often been obscured by the greater fame of her mother and her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the enfant terrible of the modernist stage, her quietly intense and prolific workmanship, and her emphasis on socially responsible drama, call for a greater understanding of her singular achievement as one of the first important women of twentieth-century theatre.
She avoided the worn-out formulae, the too consciously over-drilled effect of expertness, and gave to her productions an element of surprise achieved by a guarded nonchalance, an air of improvisation which was indeed more cunning and deliberate than the enchanted audience had any reason to suspect.
-Sybil Thorndike
I think I have never known anyone whose work, though never sufficiently recognized publicly, in its own right, will go on so surely, through so many people.
-Margaret Webster
There can be little doubt that women playwrights, designers, and directors have frequently been relegated to the shadows in the traditional renderings of the history of the world stage. Aside from the fame lavished on actresses, particularly in the last few centuries, other theatrical women have often been overlooked and, until the modern era, discouraged from pursuing non-acting avenues of accomplishment in the theatre. In the last one hundred years, the feminist movement has inspired women to strive for new opportunities. The result has been that the theatre is enriched by their creativity and the theatre's history is corrected and expanded by the re-emergence of their pioneering forbears from the aforementioned shadows. In Women in American Theatre, Helen Krich Chinoy writes of the ways that a few singular women of the past were liberated "mostly by circumstance and sometimes by desire" to serve "the...