For the 2025 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting, Jason Shafford and Caitlin Hubbard included my paper on their panel, “Over the Hills and Far Away,” and asked us to talk about the “remarkable reach across space and time” of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. After a book of mine has been out for a […]
Author: Paula Backscheider
Camp Followers Become a Major Type of Character
We do not think of camp followers as middle or even aristocratic women nor as a major type of theatre character. The lower class wives and dependents of active duty military men in Humours of the Army that Alice Snecker and Moll are our image today. As individual representatives of people and as characters in […]
Getting to Know Camp Followers
When I began the research for Women in Wartime, I was simply looking at how wartime women were represented on the stage. What were they like? What did they do? In what familiar plots did they appear? The content of this blog draws upon and stands upon the foundation of numerous diligent researchers. My book […]
Who Makes Meaning? What Work Does My Book Do? Military Recruiting
A student wrote of my book, “What I found most interesting were … resonant examples of wartime women and the similarities that continue to be exemplified in the present day.” The most critical and challenging need when war or even the threat of war arises is recruitment. The US Army just announced that over the […]
Who Makes Meaning? What Does My New Book Do?
Last night UPS delivered a book including an essay of mine. The contributor’s list gave my title as Wartime Women: Intimate Conscripts on the British Stage rather than my publisher’s. For me, the book had always been about a group of some thousands of women and the playwrights and actresses who brought them to the […]