Ringwood came of age as a writer at a time when the Canadian Theatre,
dominated by the development of amateur, extension, and educational drama,
had never been more encouraging of native female talent; entered middle
age at a time when the rising current of professionalism tended to be dismissive
of an earlier generation of writers which, by choice or necessity, had
embraced theatre as an avocation rather than a profession: and entered
old age at a time when the Canadian theatre was again open to reclaiming
and reassessing that earlier generation and the women in particular, as
a part of the larger mosaic of both theatrical and women's history and
writing in Canada. Reflecting similar concerns in Ringwood's correspondence,
interviews and lectures particularly in her later decades, The Lodge, written
in 1977 and revised over 1978 and 1979, when Ringwood was in her late 60s
and nearing the end of a long productive life, captures some of these levels
of irony, ambivalence, and sense of struggling with multiple "selves" -
whether created by oneself or other people - in what could be called a
self-portrait of the artist as an older woman.
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