Writers with Entries

• Elizabeth Shirley, 1566 - 1641, author of the earliest first-hand biography of an Englishwoman
• Mary Fisher, 1623? - 1698, early Quaker activist remembered for preaching to the Sultan
• Helen Craik, c. 1751 - 1825, Scottish poet and novelist, friend of Robert Burns
• Catherine Cuthbertson, fl. 1802 - 1830, novelist who had great success with the Gothic Romance of the Pyrenees, [1802]
• Mary Ann Kelty, 1789 - 1873, novelist, life-writer, religious writer, early admirer of Jane Austen
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 1789 - 1867, "one of nineteenth-century America's most prolific and versatile women writers"
• Harriet Smythies, 1813? - 1883, poet and prolific novelist of courtship and social satire
• Roxburghe Lothian, 1819 - 1876, author of a novel about Dante and Beatrice, and an extraordinary romance based on her own life
• Frances E. W. Harper, 1825 - 1911, "first African-American woman of letters," activist on behalf of emancipation and the rights of woman
• Jessie Ellen Cadell, 1844 - 1884, novelist and translator of Omar Khayyám
• Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844 - 1911, US novelist, journalist, and writer in women's causes
• Christina Fraser-Tytler, 1848 - 1927, Scottish poet and novelist, remembered for her portrayal of working-class characters
• Sarah Orne Jewett, 1849 - 1909, novelist of New England
• Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850 - 1919, best-selling US poet: facile, sentimental, lively, memorable
• Mary Cholmondeley, 1859 - 1925, writer of popular fiction with links to the New Woman movement
• George Egerton, 1859 - 1945, woman of letters, precursor of Modernism, outspoken about female sexuality
• Edith Lyttelton, c. 1865 - 1948, dramatist and writer of politically inflected prose (biography, travel, books on parapsychology)
• John Oliver Hobbes, 1867 - 1906, novelist, playwright, and essayist, whose career moved from epigrammatic wit to religious feeling
• Colette, 1873 - 1954, novelist, dramatist, autobiographer, and journalist, first Frenchwoman to be honoured with a state funeral
• Romer Wilson, 1891 - 1930, philosophical novelist, briefly hailed for exceptional originality
• Frances Horovitz, 1938 - 1983, broadcaster and poet of landscape and personal feeling
• Jeni Couzyn, born 1942, South African-British-Canadian poet and feminist anthologist
• Sally Purcell, 1944 - 1998, poet, scholar, and translator
• Claire Luckham, born 1944, feminist dramatist for stage and radio: began with analysis of contemporary gender politics and went on to dramatise the lives of historical women
• Jo Shapcott, born 1953, poet whose first retrospective collection, 2000, was hailed for "formative significance" and for "rewriting the English poetic canon"

224 new free-standing chronology entries

218 existing author entries were also updated or enhanced. 100 existing free-standing chronology entries were also updated or enhanced

minor technological improvements

25 entries (16 British women writers, 9 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted); 224 free-standing chronology entries; 673 bibliographical listings; 62,383 tags; 206,491 words (exclusive of tags)

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