Shirley Gee is an award-winning dramatist whose writing was effectively ended by the onset of Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome (CFIDS) in 1988. In the fourteen years prior to that she had achieved several prestigious awards for her plays, especially those written for the radio--ultimately, her favorite medium. Gee needs and deserves to be placed in the wider context of the emergence of feminist women dramatists in the 1970s and 1980s. While her output was inevitably and cruelly limited by her illness, her major works demonstrate a writer of acute sensibility and empathy, especially for her central female characters. These are women struggling against oppressive circumstances, threatening to define them as irredeemably marginalized. Nevertheless, there is a refreshing absence of narrow rhetoric or polemic in her work, and through her distinctive use of a poetic, heightened dialogue she explores characters whose marginalization is paradoxically liberating for them and their...