Tanya Caldwell’s anthology Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, published in 2011, includes a selection of lively criticism by women dramatists along with four plays by Aphra Behn, Hannah Cowley, Catherine Clive, and Susanna Centlivre. Aphra Behn’s “Epistle to the Reader,” from her play The Dutch Lover, is a humorous but powerful defense of women playwrights. Not incidentally, it contains this hilariously scathing description of a theatregoer who questions women’s abilities as dramatists:

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In a recent article in The Times Literary Supplement John Sutherland discusses the complex composition history of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, in particular why “the line between ‘influence’ and ‘plagiarism’ is never easy to trace.”

In the recently published Broadview Edition of this classic adventure story, Sutherland expands on his discussion of Stevenson’s “plundering” of other writers; he also touches on the author’s writer’s block, and the surprisingly disturbing and complex nature of what was meant to be a children’s story.

The following excerpt from the introduction to Sutherland’s edition of Treasure Island cheekily inquires into the geographic whereabouts of the island:

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