Ellen Terry's letters to Amey Stansfield were written between 1892 the first and several later ones cannot be precisely dated because the envelopes are missing – and 31 August 1907, a period covering the last decade of her association with Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre and also the peak years of her correspondence with Bernard Shaw, who called her ‘one of the greatest letter-writers who ever lived’. There are thirtythree of them, and although sometimes a long interval elapses between letters – only one for each of the years 1902 and 1907, and none at all for 1895, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1901 and 1904 – the inference need not be drawn that the collection is incomplete, for Amey carefully preserved them. Her own letters to Ellen Terry have not survived.

Despite the tendency for Victorian performers to be credited with increasing respectability and middle-class status and for actors to receive the highest official commendations, the popular association between actresses and prostitutes and belief in actresses' inappropriate sexual conduct endured throughout the nineteenth century. In the United States, religious fundamentalism accounts for much of the prejudice, but in Great Britain, where puritanical influences were not as influential on the theatre, other factors helped to preserve the derogatory view of actresses. In certain times and places actresses did have real links with the oldest of all ‘women's professions’, but the notion that the dual identity of Roman dancers or the exploits of some Restoration performers justify the popular association between actresses and prostitutes in the Victorian era is patently insufficient. The notion persisted throughout the nineteenth century because Victorians recognized that acting and whoring were the occupations of self-sufficient women who plied their trades in public places, and because Victorians believed that actresses' male colleagues and patrons inevitably complicated transient lifestyles, economic insecurity, and night hours with sexual activity. In the spirit of Gilbert and Gubar's axiom that experience generates metaphor and metaphor creates experience, the actress and the prostitute were both objects of desire whose company was purchased through commercial exchange. While patrons bought the right to see them, to project their fantasies on them, and to denigrate and misrepresent their sexuality, both groups of women found it necessary constantly to sue for men's attention and tolerate the false imagery. Their similarities were reinforced by coexistence in neighbourhoods and work places where they excited and placated the playgoer's lust in an eternal loop, twisted like a Mobius strip into the appearance of a single surface.

The theatrical memoirs published by actresses in the nineteenth century were generally written by women who had achieved recognition in their profession and had, therefore, acquired a place in society. Comparatively little is known about the jobbing actress who never achieved distinction in London, but who eked out an existence in the provinces, either with one of the better companies in Bath, Bristol or Edinburgh, on a theatrical ‘circuit’, or with one of the troupes of travelling players who rarely performed in theatre buildings, but in barns, village halls, inns and, occasionally, in private houses. At the bottom of the pile came the performers in fairground booths and penny theatres.

Most of Great Britain's active women dramatists have found crucial support and encouragement for their work from communities of women in the theatre. Off stage, during the process of planning, writing, and rehearsing, collaborations have changed the standard theatrical work pattern and modified the way women writers conceive of drama. On stage, the products – the plays – reflect their communal generation in their focus on groups. In short, the collaborations, collectives, and groups which have encouraged and advanced women's theatrical work account for its particular verve. And while the position of women's theatre communities is now aesthetically and politically much more complicated than it was in the early 70s, playwright Sue Townsend can still proclaim, albeit more optimistically than most, that collaboration with a group ‘is the only way to work’.

Christopher Hampton's play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, based on the novel by Laclos, was first produced at The Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1985. It was immediately acclaimed, and after its transfer early in 1986 to The Pit at the Royal Shakespeare Company's London centre, the Barbican, both play and performers won several awards, including four for Best Play. In October 1986, with only a few changes of performer, the production further transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End. At the time of writing the Ambassadors production, recast, has opened to enthusiastic reviews, while the original production has achieved transfer to New York. Hampton's triumphant success in dramatizing Laclos's novel deserves the closest attention.