The Day After the Fair

A servant girl persuades her mistress to write to a man who made her pregnant during a brief romantic interlude. Only after the wedding does the young man discover it is the letter writer he loves

The play, by Frank Harvey, adapted from Thomas Hardy, is set in the late 1890s and is the story of a tangled web woven by Edith, a very bored and unhappy wife, who writes letters on her maid Anna’s behalf to a young man who Anna has met after the fair. Anna is unable to write and read well and so the wife finds an outlet for repressed emotions.
Edith is married to Arthur, a brewer, who is pompous, boring but at times, kindly. His sister is Letty who runs the house and she is fond of her sister in law and understands her more than Arthur does. There is maid called Sarah, a jolly little busybody. The lover is Charles, a pompous ambitious and probably cruel man.