Elizabeth Polwhele

Elizabeth Polewhele was one of the first women to write for the professional stage in London. She was probably the daughter of Theodore Polwhele at Tiverton, a nonconformist clergyman. She married Stephen Lobb, another influential clergyman, and the couple had five children. Elizabeth wrote several comic plays during the early Restoration period, such as The Faithfull Virgins (c. 1670) and The Frolicks, or The Lawyer Cheated (1671), which was performed at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1671. She left in manuscript two plays, a tragedy and a comedy, another work whose genre is unidentified but which may have been a masque, and probably a poem.