The stage history of Medea has been charted in detail in Medea in Performance where the variations on the myth in opera, on film and on the public stage have been meticulously detailed. There and elsewhere Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Marianne McDonald have traced the manner in which the portrayal of Medea reflects the social changes of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Macintosh pointing in particular to the significance of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. Lorna Hardwick in her Translating Words, Translating Cultures devotes a central chapter to ‘Reverence and subversion in nineteenth-century translation’ and homes in on Greek tragedy in her ‘Theatres of the mind: Greek tragedy in women's writing in English in the nineteenth century’.

It seems hardly coincidental that there were six translations of Medea published in the ten years following the passing of the Divorce Act of 1857, with Augusta Webster's to follow in 1868. As influential in the enthusiasm for the theme was the taste for sensation literature with the act of infanticide claiming a classical pedigree. Much of the ground that might be covered in a chapter devoted to the translation of Euripides' Medea has already been treated.