Woman on Her Own, False Gods, and The Red Robe

About

Eugène Brieux was the leading French naturalist playwright of his generation, and George Bernard Shaw championed him as the most important dramatist in the world — a claim that has not entirely stood the test of time but reflects how seriously Brieux was taken in his own era. This volume collects three of his social-problem plays, each trained on a specific injustice: the position of single working women, the clash between indigenous belief and colonial Christianity, and the corruption of the French judiciary. Brieux's method is surgical rather than poetic — he diagnoses social illness with the precision of a reformer rather than the lyricism of an artist — but his plays retain their historical importance as documents of pre-war French social conscience.