BETTY ROLAND was a highly passionate and ambitious playwright. She aspired to be a quintessentially Australian counterpart to Eugene O'Neill. Despite enthusiastic responses to her best-known play The Touch of Silk, she failed to make a living out of playwriting and turned her hand to journalism and scriptwriting for radio stations. Theatre critic Philip Parsons described The Touch of Silk and Feet of Clay as plays about 'disruptive femininity in an ordered man's world [where femininity is often a construct]'. Roland died in Sydney in 1996.
