Elizabeth Baker

Elizabeth Baker (20 August 1876 – 8 March 1962) was an English playwright whose plays explored class, gender and the domestic and professional lives of the lower middle classes.

Baker was born in London on 20 August 1876. Her parents were drapers and she began her working life as a drapery assistant, and later a typist, newspaper editor and journalist for The Spectator. In June 1915 at the age of 39 she married James Allaway, a widower. Baker worked for the suffrage movement and was involved with the Women Writers Suffrage League and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

The themes of Baker's plays arose from her social consciousness and were analyses of class, gender and social mobility. The plot of her first play Beastly Pride (1907), performed by the Croydon Repertory Theatre, considered a lower middle-class girl who wished to marry a working class builder and her parents' objection to the marriage.

Edith (1912) was first performed as a fund-raiser for the Women Writers Suffrage League at the Princes Theatre in London, and deals with the issues of a woman inheriting wealth from a family business. Working women and economic insecurity are the themes of other plays including Partnership, Miss Tassey, The Price of Thomas Scott, Miss Robinson and Penelope Forgives.

In 2019 Mint Theater Company in New York City launched the "Meet Miss Baker" series which aims to present several of Baker's works through full productions and readings; to "bring new attention to this long forgotten, much deserving author." In 2019 they produced The Price of Thomas Scott. They also presented readings of Edith and Miss Tassey. In 2020 they planned to present Chains and Partnership but these plans were interrupted by the COVID-19 Pandemic. They went on to present Chains in the summer of 2022 at Theatre Row with the same cast as had been scheduled two years earlier. They also staged a reading of Penelope Forgives.

Plays

Beastly Pride (1907) - originally titled A Question of Caste Chains (1909) Cupid in Clapham (1910) Miss Tassey (1910) Edith (1912) The Price of Thomas Scott (1913) Beastly Pride (1914) Over a Garden Wall (1915) Partnership (1917) Miss Robinson (1918) Bert's Girl (1927) Umbrellas (1927) Penelope Forgives (1930) One of the Spicers (1932)