SOURCE: "Tragedies by Women: Mlle. Barbier and Mme. Gomez," in Sunset: A History of Parisian Drama in the Last Years of Louis XIV, 1701–1715, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945, pp. 69–81.

In the following excerpt, Lancaster provides an analysis of the works of two women who were among the most prominent female French tragedians of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The seventeenth century produced eleven women dramatists. None of them attained high rank in her profession or wrote more than a modest number of plays, but they at least made it possible for women to have their productions accepted for performance at the Comédie Française. The most successful tragedy written by a woman in the seventeenth century, Mlle Bernard's Brutus, was given for the last time in 1699. The eighteenth century was not slow in finding for her a successor in Mlle Barbier, whose first play appeared in...