Orlando: Women's Writing

Writers with Entries

New: January 2009

New Author Entries

  • Elizabeth Melvill (perhaps 1575 to 1640), Scottish poet whose Ane Godlie Dream, 1603, went through more editions than any other work by a British woman before 1640.
  • Sarah Savage, 1664-1752.Religious diarist who writes frankly about her longing for, bearing, and losing children.
  • Susan Smythies, 1721- after 1774. Author of three novels published during the 1750s, blending sentiment with social satire.
  • Cassandra Cooke, 1744-1826. Author a single historical novel as well as unpublished papers in prose and verse. A cousin of Jane Austen.
  • Elizabeth Gilding, before 1755 to after 1785. Magazine poet of the spiritual, erotic, maternal, and sentimental.
  • Cassandra, Lady Hawke, 1746-1813. Author of one highly sentimental published novel. Lady Hawke was another cousin of Jane Austen.
  • Judith Sargent Murray, 1751-1820. American periodical essayist, feminist (a precursor of Mary Wollstonecraft), dramatist, and author of a sentimental novel.
  • Sarah Wentworth Morton. 1759-1846. American poet of national identity and relations between the races.
  • Anne Evans, 1820-70. Writer of poems, songs, and dance music.
  • Emily Lawless, 1835-1913. Irish novelist, historian, and miscellaneous writer, of interest for her relation to nationalist, feminist, and environmentalist ideas.
  • Charlotte Mary Brame, 1836-84. Victorian popular novelist or "dime" novelist whose most-used pseudonym became a "brand" which long outlived her.
  • Lucy Toulmin Smith, 1838-1911. Pioneering literary and historical scholar, editor and translator.
  • Lady Charlotte Elliot, 1839-80. Obscure Scottish poet whose three volumes make frequent use of women's voices in dramatic monologues, often mythological.
  • Blanche Warre Cornish, 1847-1922. Author of two novels and of family and literary memoirs. A conversationalist whose sayings were posthumously collected and published.
  • May Laffan, 1849-1916. Irish novelist and miscellaneous writer, remembered for her campaign against convent education for girls.
  • Laurence Hope, 1865-1904. Author of transgressive erotic poems in a colonial setting.
  • Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1868-1947. Biographer, novelist, and memoirist, best-known for her thriller The Lodger, and for memoirs of her French and English family and of the London (and Paris) literary scene.
  • Constance Lytton, 1869-1923. Suffragist whose slender output as a writer is dominated by her experiences of being forcibly fed in prison - but only when she concealed her social status.
  • Henry Handel Richardson, 1870-1946. Australian expatriate novelist whose work is influenced more by the European than the English tradition, little noticed until her penultimate novel was hailed as a work of genius.
  • Willa Cather, 1873-1947. American novelist of the midwestern pioneers, of the struggle of provincial artists to make good, and of missionaries in colonial Spanish and French America.
  • Mary Gawthorpe, 1881-1973. Working-class suffragist, speaker, pamphleteer, co-editor of The Freewoman, and memoirist or suffrage historian.
  • Christina Stead, 1902-83. Australian expatriate novelist who passed from unknown to great-writer status, then back to unknown again, whose hardline Communist politics told against her recognition.
  • Cecily Mackworth, 1911-2006. Journalist and travel writer, chronicler of countries and societies in violent upheaval, as well as novelist and memoirist. An autobiography is not yet published.
  • Alison Fell, born 1944. Working-class Scotswoman active in London feminist theatre groups of the 1970s, poet, novelist, dramatist, author of an erotic pseudo-translation from Heian Japanese.
  • Zoë Fairbairns, born 1948. Feminist writer whose work spans many genres, particularly novels and short stories.