Writers with Entries

• Mary Oxlie, fl. 1616. Either English or Scots, author of a single known poem, which discusses the difficulties of writing for a woman.
• Elizabeth Warren, 1617-after 1649. Author of three hard-hitting Puritan-political pamphlets.
• Elizabeth Bury, 1644-1720. A learned woman and a religious diarist who records both spiritual soul-searching and details of daily life.
• Elizabeth Delaval, c. 1648-1717. Author of a diary/commonplace-book/religious self-examination, which also relates her love-affair and unwilling marriage in terms of heroic romance.
• Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford, 1699-1754. Patron, poet, editor, chiefly remembered for her poems about an Englishman betraying his native-American lover.
• Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, 1739-1815. Pamphleteer, religious diarist, one of the earliest Methodist women to preach.
• Eliza Parsons, 1739-1811. Prolific and popular author of two kinds of novels: didactic-domestic, and melodramatically gothic (including two of Jane Austen's "Horrid Novels").
• Elizabeth Helme, 1743/53- by 1814. Popular didactic novelist and children's writer. At least two of her books achieved huge success.
• Elizabeth Hands, 1746-1815. Unusually non-deferential labouring-class poet and satirist.
• Mary Ann Cavendish Bradshaw, 1758-1849. Survived a humiliating divorce case and went on to publish two extraordinary historical novels with trenchant critical prefaces.
• Maria De Fleury, before 1760- after 1792. Anti-Catholic pamphleteer in prose and Miltonic verse.
• Mary Lamb, 1764-1847. Lead author of Tales from Shakespear and other works for which her brother Charles still tends to get credit.
• Charlotte Elliott, 1789-1871. Hymn-writer, author of "Just as I am-without one plea".
• Anne Katharine Elwood, 1796-1873. Author of a book of travels in India and a biographical collection of English women writers.
• Elizabeth Fenton, 1804-75. Travelled in India, settled in Tasmania; her account of these experiences was published posthumously.
• Charlotte Godley, 1821-1907. Emigrated to New Zealand in mid-nineteenth century. Her travel letters were published after her death.
• Sophie Veitch, after 1837- after 1921. Scottish novelist whose obscurity belies her interest: author of sensation novels validating passion, and trenchant reviewing of fiction.
• Anna Steele, c. 1840-1914. Poet and novelist, daughter of a woman novelist. Her earliest publication is here firmly identified for the first time.
• Pandita Ramabai (Ramabai Dongre), 1858-1922. Indian poet (in Sanskrit), translator, travel writer, and activist publishing on behalf of Hindu women. First woman to be granted the title of Pandita for learning (by the University of Calcutta in 1878).
• Beatrice Harraden, 1864-1936. Novelist and suffrage writer. Her great hit was Ships that Pass in the Night, 1893.
• Rose Allatini, 1890- c. 1980. Mostly ignored by histories, she wrote novels of Jewish family life and later of Occultist idealism. Her work under different pseudonyms is here first considered together. Remembered solely for Despised and Rejected, 1918 (suppressed for its pacifist message), which features centrally a gay man and a lesbian.
• Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler), 1909-1958. Short-story writer, novelist, poet, nature writer, and chronicler of her own experience with epileptic seizures.
• Jennifer Dawson, 1929-2000. Novelist called "the supreme chronicler of insanity," who depicts mental breakdown from the inside, questioning the sanity of the normal.
• Michelene Wandor, born 1940. Feminist writer who began with street theatre and experimental drama, critic and anthologist, writer on Jewish themes and on music.
• Michèle Roberts, born 1949. Feminist writer of novels (including creatively updated biblical narrative), stories, poetry and memoir. Short-listed for the Booker in 1992.

Our Links entry points now include today in Orlando . This provides a chronological list of all events that occurred on the current date in Orlando history, providing serendipitous and fascinating juxtapositions.

143 new items of dated historical material have been added, from further detail about the First and Second Crusades to the handsomely-designed re-issues marking the thirtieth anniversary of Virago Modern Classics.

Listed below are a tiny proportion of all the entries revised (173 in total). Run-of-the-mill additions (new editions, new scholarship, sale prices, film versions, etc.) are not listed here.

• Penelope Aubin: new identity: previously unknown father, mother, illegitimate birth, and death date.
• Jane Austen: her putative meeting with Hannah More.
• Joanna Baillie: recent productions of her plays.
• Agatha Christie: a projected new graphic-novel edition.
• Juliana Horatia Ewing: more on Caldecott's illustrations for her children's stories.
• Elspeth Huxley: material from unpublished letters, including her comment on Flame Trees of Thika.
• Henrietta Camilla Jenkin: a recent sale-room price; identification of an obscure dedicatee.
• Doris Lessing: from interviews at the time of her Nobel Prize.
• L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables centenary publications including prequel.
• Toni Morrison: an encomium by Hilary Mantel on Beloved.
• Mariana Starke: some family details.
• Sylvia Plath: her visual art.
• Jeanette Winterson: her first book was one of those sent by Canadian novelist Yann Martel to the Prime Minister of Canada, as part of an eccentric literary education project.
• W. B. Yeats: added circumstances of his burial and re-burial.

63 existing free-standing chronology entries were also updated or enhanced. Orlando is often its own updater. Someone doing a chronological search on "cholera" noticed that our record of the first great cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century, drawn from impeccable medical-history sources, dated the outbreak a couple of months after Joanna Baillie commented on the spread of cholera in London and the resulting public anxiety. A change in wording sufficed to make Orlando's record more accurate than those medical sources.

25 entries (24 British women writers, 1 other woman writer); 143 free-standing chronology entries; 649 bibliographical listings; 76,368 tags; 206,137 words (exclusive of tags).

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