IT IS CERTAINLY true to say, and scholarship is increasingly aware, that women do write drama, and did so even before the mid-twentieth century. But there is also, as this study illustrates, a pattern to many women's careers as playwrights: Ebner-Eschenbach, Druskowitz, Croissant- Rust, Marholm, delle Grazie, Märten, and Fleisser can all be shown to have had dramatic ambitions in their earlier years as writers that were never fully realized. “Die Autorin,” says Fleisser, “biegt wieder in das Epische aus, weil ihr das mehr liegt.”

I have argued that Fleisser is wrong: that theater is by no means a genre that is in itself incongenial to women — its corporeality might even be read as a particular invitation to the sex that has been cast throughout the history of ideas as particularly corporeal. So why did so many of them abandon the genre?

The classic “comparative” answer is that many men writers did not succeed in the realm of the drama, either, and that literary misfortunes — bad timing or lack of talent — befall men and women equally. But it is clearly not as simple as that. We have observed that even women who did not give up writing serious drama (such as Viebig and Lasker-Schüler) have not been received as dramatists in literary history, but as prose writers (Viebig) and poets (Lasker). Nor do chauvinistic reviews and overpersonalized reception befall men and women equally: Fleisser was “die blonde stramme Ingolstädterin”3 where Brecht was never (to my knowledge) dubbed “der fahle feiste Augsburger” or anything similar. In 1990, the then-new dramatist Kerstin Specht (who recently wrote a drama about Fleisser called Marieluise) found a keen reviewer in Peter von Becker, who enthused over her “roter Haarschopf und das Lächeln eines weiblichen Pierrots, Charme und klugen Witz in den Augen.” Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.