45 British women dramatists and playwrights

List of early-modern women playwrights (UK)

This is a chronological list of women playwrights who were active in the United Kingdom before approximately 1800, with a brief indication of productivity.

Jane Arden was a British film director, actress, screenwriter, songwriter and poet. Her writings for stage and television also attracted attention in the 1950s.

Enid Algerine, Lady Jones, was a British author and playwright, today best known for the 1935 story National Velvet.

Malorie Blackman is a British writer who held the position of Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She primarily writes literature and television drama for children and young adults. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues. Her critically and popularly acclaimed Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional dystopia to explore racism. Her book New Windmills Spring sold out within a week of publishing it.

Gertrude Elizabeth, Lady Colin Campbell was an Irish-born journalist, author, playwright, and editor. She was married to Lord Colin Campbell, a brother-in-law of Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's fourth daughter.

Margaret Yvonne Busby OBE, Hon. FRSL, also titled Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when in the 1960s she co-founded with Clive Allison (1944–2011) the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons".

Juanita Casey was a poet, playwright, novelist and artist as well as a horse and zebra trainer and breeder. Her writing celebrates her time in Ireland and the New Forest.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an English novelist, dramatist, and philosopher. She wrote on moral philosophy, theological tracts, and had a voluminous correspondence.

Elizabeth, Princess Berkeley, sometimes unofficially styled Margravine of Brandenburg-Ansbach, previously Elizabeth Craven, Baroness Craven, of Hamstead Marshall, was an author and playwright, perhaps best known for her travelogues. She was the third child of the 4th Earl of Berkeley, and was born in Mayfair in the West End of London.

Catherine Lucy Czerkawska, is a Scottish-based novelist and playwright. She has written many plays for the stage and for BBC Radio 4 and has published numerous novels and short stories. Wormwood – about the Chernobyl disaster – was produced at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1997, while her novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize in 2005.

Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She is the first woman, the first Scottish-born poet and the first known LGBT poet to hold the position.

Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta was a Nigerian-born novelist, based in the UK from 1962, who also wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Most of her early novels were published by the London-based company Allison and Busby, where her editor was Margaret Busby.

Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, was an English poet, dramatist, translator, and historian. She is the first woman known to have written and published an original play in English. From an early age, she was recognized as an accomplished scholar by contemporary writers.

Elaine Feinstein was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator.

Mrs Gardner or Sarah Cheney was a British comedic actress and playwright.

Sophie Irene Hunter is an English avant-garde theatre and opera director, playwright, and former performer. She made her directorial debut in 2007 co-directing the experimental play The Terrific Electric at the Barbican Pit after her theatre company Boileroom was granted the Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award. In addition, she has directed an Off-Off-Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (2010) at Access Theatre, the performance art titled Lucretia (2011) based on Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia at Location One's Abramovic Studio in New York City, and the Phantom Limb Company's 69° South also known as Shackleton Project (2011) which premièred at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre and later toured North America.

Josephine Kermode (1852–1937) was a Manx poet and playwright better known by the pen name "Cushag".

Doris May Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean (Rhodesian) novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia, where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).

Christine Longford, Countess of Longford was a playwright. Following her parents' separation her mother took in lodgers while Christine attended Oxford Wells High School. She won a scholarship to study Classics at Somerville College, Oxford. While there she met and in 1925 married Edward Pakenham, later 6th Earl of Longford. She moved to Ireland with her husband in 1925. They divided their time between Dublin and Pakenham Hall, now Tullynally Castle, in Castlepollard, County Westmeath.

Leueen MacGrath was an English actress and playwright and the second wife of George S. Kaufman, from 1949 until their divorce in 1957.

Rohina Malik is an American playwright, actress, speaker, story teller and educator of South Asian descent.

Delarivier "Delia" Manley was an English author, playwright, and political pamphleteer. Manley is sometimes referred to, with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, as one of "the fair triumvirate of wit", which is a later attribution.

Una Maud Victoria Marson was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.

Nuala McKeever is a comic actress from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Denise Mina is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir, she has also dabbled in comic book writing, having written 13 issues of Hellblazer.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet. Lady Mary is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from travels to the Ottoman Empire, as wife to the British ambassador to Turkey, which Billie Melman described as "the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient". Aside from her writing, Lady Mary is also known for introducing and advocating for smallpox inoculation to Britain after her return from Turkey. Her writings address and challenge the hindering contemporary social attitudes towards women and their intellectual and social growth.

Hannah More was an English religious writer and philanthropist, remembered as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical philanthropist. Born in Bristol, she taught at a school founded there by her father and began writing plays. She became involved with the London literary elite and a leading Bluestocking member. Her later plays and poetry became more evangelical and she joined a group campaigning against the slave trade. In the 1790s she wrote several Cheap Repository Tracts on moral, religious and political topics for distribution to the literate poor. Meanwhile, she broadened her links with schools that she and her sister Martha had founded in rural Somerset. These modelled her strictures on the education of the poor, permitting a limited reading ability but no writing.

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton, Lady Stirling-Maxwell was an English social reformer and author active in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Norton left her husband in 1836, following which he sued her close friend Lord Melbourne, the then Whig Prime Minister, for criminal conversation. The jury threw out the claim, but she was unable to obtain a divorce and was denied access to her three sons. Norton's intense campaigning led to the passing of the Custody of Infants Act 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 and the Married Women's Property Act 1870. Norton modelled for the fresco of Justice in the House of Lords by Daniel Maclise, who chose her because she was seen by many as a famous victim of injustice.

Olga Petrova was a British-American actress, screenwriter and playwright.

Katherine or Catherine Philips, also known as "The Matchless Orinda", was an Anglo-Welsh royalist poet, translator, and woman of letters. She achieved renown as a translator of Pierre Corneille's Pompée and Horace, and for her editions of poetry after her death. She was highly regarded by many writers of 17th century literature, including John Dryden and John Keats, as being influential.

Mary Pix was an English novelist and playwright. As an admirer of Aphra Behn and colleague of Susanna Centlivre, Pix has been called "a link between women writers of the Restoration and Augustan periods".

Manon Steffan Ros is a Welsh novelist, playwright, games author, and scriptwriter. She is the author of over twenty children's books and three novels for adults, all in Welsh. Her award-winning novel Blasu has been translated into English, under the title of The Seasoning.

Jane M. Scott (1779–1839) was a British theatre manager, performer, and playwright.

Frances Sheridan was an Anglo-Irish novelist and playwright.

Katherine Githa Sowerby, also known under her pen name K. G. Sowerby, was an English playwright, children's writer, and member of the Fabian Society. A feminist, she was well-known during the early twentieth century for her 1912 hit play Rutherford & Son, but lapsed into obscurity in later decades.

Bernadette Strachan is an English author of popular women's fiction and among the more popular writers of "chick lit."

Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne was a notable member of the British aristocracy during the Georgian period (18th-century).

Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She first worked as a writer and poet, later turning the visual arts. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black peoples in Europe.

Jacqueline Walker is a British political activist and writer. She has been a teacher and anti-racism trainer. She is the author of a family memoir, Pilgrim State, and the co-writer and performer of a one-woman show, The Lynching. She held the roles of Vice-Chair of South Thanet Constituency Labour Party and Vice-Chair of Momentum before being suspended and ultimately expelled from the party for misconduct.

Elizabeth Watkin-Jones was a Welsh children's book author, who wrote in the Welsh language.

Louise Welsh is an English-born author of short stories and psychological thrillers, resident in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also written three plays, an opera, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to journals and anthologies. In 2004, she received the Corine Literature Prize.

Margaret Harries Wilson was an English poet, playwright, lyricist, writer and editor. She is considered one of the first female biographers.

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the more important modernist 20th century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Elizabeth Yorke, Countess of Hardwicke, née Lindsay, was a British playwright and member of the aristocracy.