Hannah Cowley

Hannah Cowley was an eighteenth-century playwright and poet. She began writing after attending a play in London with her husband, Thomas. Although she claims in the introduction to her collected works (1813) that her husband initially teased her about her theatrical ambition, her first play, The Runaway was produced by David Garrick at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1776. The play was a success and she followed it with Who’s the Dupe and Albina in 1779. Her 1780 play, The Belle’s Stratagem was a major hit and filled the Drury Lane Theatre night after night. It was so popular that Queen Charlotte asked for it to be performed for the royal family every season.

In the late 1780s, Cowley was engaged in a public ‘paper war’ with the playwright Hannah More. Cowley believed that More’s plays strongly resembled her own work and she publicly suggested that More was indulging in a spot of plagiarism. Although she wrote extensively for the rest of her life, More never wrote for the stage again after her ‘war’ with Cowley came to an end.

Cowley continued to write until 1794 but none of her later plays achieved the same success as The Belle’s Stratagem. She also had a semi-successful career as a poet, writing overly sentimental and light-hearted poems. She retired in 1801 and spent her latter years away from London theatres.