Apropos of Women and Theatres.
Logan, Olive. Apropos of Women and Theatres. With a paper or two on Parisian topics. New York and London: Carleton, Publisher, 1869.
8vo.; lightly foxed; plum cloth stamped in blind and gilt; well-worn; damp-stained; spine badly sunned.
First edition of the earliest of Logan’s three collections of commentary on social problems and the theatre; includes essays on Paris life and various aspects of the theatre business, and one on voting. It was followed by Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes (1870, reprinted as The Mimic World in 1871), and Get Thee Behind Me, Satan! (1872).
Despite theatrical upbringing and a passable dramatic talent, Olive Logan (1839-1909) was convinced, after fifteen years of writing plays that closed almost before they opened and acting in productions by others, that her talents and desires lay elsewhere. So in 1868 she began a long and successful career as a public speaker with her debut lecture, “Stage Struck,” eliciting this response from the critic George C. D. Odell: she was “too homely to act” but was “a clever speaker” (NAW, p. 423). After a year of traveling and speaking on theatre, travel, and women in the workplace, she joined the suffrage movement and added women’s rights to her slate of issues, though she continued to write and to translate plays, as well, and even got one produced on Fifth Avenue in 1870.
In addition to her collections of essays on the theatre, Logan published Chateau Frissac (1862), “a novel intended to show the evils of the French ‘marriages of convenience’” (NAW, p. 423); They Met by Change: A Society Novel (1873); and several stories, in pamphlet form, brought out by the American News Company. After her second marriage failed in 1906 and left her nearly destitute, she attracted the attention and concern of Tennessee Claflin, who eventually brought Logan to England to live with her until a breakdown in 1909 put her in an asylum, where she died soon after and was, apparently, buried in a pauper’s grave.
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