author
Rachel Baker Gale
1858–1923
Best remembered for lively parlor plays, this American dramatist wrote for amateur performance and left behind a body of work that also reflects the fierce public arguments over women's roles in the late 19th century.
1 Audiobook
After Taps
by Rachel Baker Gale, George M. (George Melville) Baker
About the author
Born in Massachusetts in 1858, Rachel Baker Gale was an American playwright who published a number of parlor plays and comedies for home or small-stage performance. She was part of a literary family: her father, George Melville Baker, was also a playwright and publisher, and her sister was the novelist Emilie Loring.
Gale wrote at least a dozen plays during her lifetime. Several of them are noted for pushing back against women's suffrage and against women taking on more public roles, which makes her work an interesting window into the cultural debates of her era as well as its popular entertainment.
She died in 1923. Today, her writing is remembered less as mainstream literary fame and more as a revealing piece of American theatrical and social history.