What's new? | Orlando

New: Fall 2024

This update to the Orlando textbase offers its first new and enhanced content since the release of its revised interface. It features 10 new and 13 enhanced profiles of women writers; 21 new freestanding events; and more than 100 new images of and related to writers with profiles, including more than 30 new images of print and manuscript texts shared by Chawton House Library and private collectors.

New Author Profiles

Anne Hunter, 1742-1821, English poet, lyricist, and salon host, poet known partly for her collaborations with composer Franz Haydn.
Mary Berry, 1763-1852, English travel-writer, playwright, and editor whose subjects include the French Revolution and who forged important relationships with Horace Walpole and Anne Damer.
Eliza Nugent Bromley, 1784-1803, English novelist and translator who is transmuted in Jane Austen's juvenilia, Love and Freindship.
Frederika Bremer, 1801-1865, Swedish writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction that were translated for wide circulation; her travels informed her feminist, anti-war, anti-slavery views.
Julia Constance Fletcher, 1859-1936, American writer who also published under the name 'George Fleming'; she lived as a New Woman and threaded feminism through some of her fiction and plays.
Madeleine Lucette Ryley, 1858-1934, English playwright, actor, and suffragist who found success in Britain and the USA.
Ethel Arnold, 1865-1930, English writer, lecturer, and photographer who centered feminism in much of her work, distinguishing herself from her sister Mary Augusta Ward.
Lili Elbe, 1882-1931, Danish artist whose life-writing documented her inner life and experiences as a trans woman in Europe; she is the subject of the novel The Danish Girl and its film adaptation.
James Tiptree, Jr, 1915-1987, American writer best known for her science fiction, including some feminist dystopian work; born Alice Sheldon, she published under multiple pseudodyms.
Alice Oswald, b. 1966, English poet recognized for her classicist perspectives and focus on the natural world; she was elected Oxford University's first woman Professor of Poetry and BBC Radio's second Poet-in-Residence, and her many awards include Canada's Griffin Poetry Prize.

Free-standing events

21 added events focus primarily on contemporary issues, such issues as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crises, the #MeToo movement, British elections and changes in its monarchy.

New Exhibit images

2 images of the autograph manuscript of one poem within the 'Mary Queen of Scots' poetic sequence by Amelia Opie (1769-1853). The poem is addressed to an infant, the future James VI and I, and is the only known piece from 'Mary Queen of Scots' to survive in its author's hand.

Summary of Content

10 profiles (6 British women writers, 4 other women writers) including the first whose collaborative authorship was led by an external contributor; 21 new free-standing chronology entries; 194 new bibliographical listings; more than 30 new Exhibit images; X new tags; X new words (exclusive of tags).

Functionality

Improvements to the interface's Results facets to provide greater specificity in event type and provenance searches, plus new filters in its Browse and Timelines areas, for event type, provenance, and date range.

Technical updates include accessibility enhancements, the introduction of usage statistics, as well as updates to Drupal 10, BaseX v. 10, and PHP 7.0.

Statistics

Orlando’s current content statistics are as follows:

Word count: 9,043,111
Profiles of women writers: 1,261
All writer profiles: 1,444
Events: 43,199 (29,361 embedded in profiles and 13,838 freestanding)
Titles in bibliography: 30,441
XML tags: 2,995,455
Persons tagged: 37,374
Organisations tagged: 8,696
Unique titles mentioned 47,067
Unique places mentioned: 12,114

News

Since Orlando’s last update, its team has released a 13-episode podcast for researchers, students, and the general public, Orlando: A Podcast on Women’s Writing, hosted by Karen Bourrier and Kathryn Holland. Co-director Susan Brown is the 2024 recipient from the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations of the Roberto Busa Prize for outstanding lifetime achievements in the application of information and communications technologies to humanities research. Katherine Binhammer has a forthcoming article in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature which draws on Orlando data to counter the feminist literary narrative that the rise of the novel directly led to the rise of the professional woman writer.

Complete List of Author Profiles

The 1444 writers listed below have their own profiles in Orlando. Writers whose nationality shifted are listed twice. More than 37,000 people and nearly 8700 organisations are mentioned or discussed somewhere in the textbase (in others' entries and in thousands of free-standing events), and hundreds of these are writers without dedicated entries.

British Women Writers with Entries		Other (international) Women Writers	Male Writers
Maria Abdy	Sylvia Kantaris	Abigail Adams	Henry Brooks Adams
Frances Neville, Baroness Abergavenny	Anna Kavan	Louisa May Alcott	Joseph Addison
Valentine Ackland	Julia Kavanagh	Maya Angelou	William Harrison Ainsworth
Sarah Flower Adams	Jackie Kay	Hannah Arendt	Archibald Alison
Fleur Adcock	Sheila Kaye-Smith	Margaret Atwood	Grant Allen
Grace Aguilar	Judith Kazantzis	Marie-Catherine d' Aulnoy	William Allingham
Joan Aiken	Molly Keane	Djuna Barnes	Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Lucy Aikin	Annie Keary	Natalie Clifford Barney	Hans Christian Andersen
Naomi Alderman	Isabella Kelly	Sylvia Beach	Matthew Arnold
Cecil Frances Alexander	Mary Ann Kelty	Simone de Beauvoir	W. H. Auden
Mrs Alexander	Adelaide Kemble	Inez Bensusan	William Edmonstoune Aytoun
Rose Allatini	Fanny Kemble	Annie Besant	Walter Bagehot
Hannah Allen	Maria Theresa Kemble	Elizabeth Bishop	R. M. Ballantyne
Margery Allingham	Margery Kempe	Ann Eliza Bleecker	Honoré de Balzac
Gillian Allnutt	May Kendall	Eavan Boland	Richard Harris Barham
Laurence Alma-Tadema	Margaret Kennedy	Elizabeth Bowen	Sir J. M. Barrie
Jane Anger	Hannah Kilham	Antoinette Brown Blackwell	Charles Baudelaire
Ariadne	Anne Killigrew	Frances Hodgson Burnett	Samuel Beckett
Pat Arrowsmith	Jemima Kindersley	Kathleen Caffyn	William Beckford
Elizabeth Ashbridge	Ellis Cornelia Knight	Anne Carson	Giuseppe Gioachino Belli
Daisy Ashford	Harriet Hamilton King	Lydia Maria Child	Arnold Bennett
Anne Askew	Sophia King	Anne Dacier	Sir Walter Besant
Lady Cynthia Asquith	Anna Kingsford	Teresa Deevy	John Betjeman
Mary Astell	Fanny Kingsley	Christine de Pisan	R. D. Blackmore
Diana Athill	Mary Kingsley	Anita Desai	William Blake
Anna Atkins	Flora Klickmann	Charlotte Despard	Giovanni Boccaccio
Penelope Aubin	Lucy Knox	Emily Dickinson	Henry George Bohn
Anne Audland	Fanny Aikin Kortright	Isak Dinesen	Dion Boucicault
Jane Austen	L. E. L.	Sara Jeannette Duncan	William Lisle Bowles
Sarah Austin	May Laffan	Toru Dutt	George Bradshaw
Elizabeth Avery	Lady Caroline Lamb	Ketaki Kushari Dyson	Rupert Brooke
Ruby M. Ayres	Mary Lamb, 1764 - 1847	Buchi Emecheta	Henry Peter, Baron Brougham
Anne Bacon	Aemilia Lanyer	Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson	Dr John Brown
Enid Bagnold	Anna Margaretta Larpent	Mary Fortune ("Waif Wander")	Robert Browning
Mary Bailey	Marghanita Laski	Hannah Webster Foster	John Buchan
Joanna Baillie	Mary Latter	Margaret Fuller	Robert Williams Buchanan
Beryl Bainbridge	Bryony Lavery	Mavis Gallant	Henry Thomas Buckle
Elizabeth Baker	Mary Lavin	Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis	Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Ella Baker	Emily Lawless	Anne Hart Gilbert	John Bunyan
Louisa Baldwin	Margery Lawrence	Nadine Gordimer	Jacob Burckhardt
Clara Balfour	Jane Lead	Eva Gore-Booth	John Burke
Isabella Banks	Mary Leadbeater	Françoise de Graffigny	Robert Burns
Anne Bannerman	Caroline Leakey	Clotilde Graves	Richard Francis Burton
Helen Bannerman	Mary Leapor	Augusta Gregory	George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron
Anna Letitia Barbauld	Q. D. Leavis	Hannah Griffitts	Thomas Carlyle
Mary Barber	Harriet Lee	Héloïse	Lewis Carroll
Hélène Barcynska	Sophia Lee	H. D.	Thomas Chatterton
Jane Barker	Vernon Lee	Sarah Josepha Hale	Geoffrey Chaucer
Mary Ann Barker	Margaret Legge	Emily Hickey	Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Pat Barker	Rosamond Lehmann	Patricia Highsmith	Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield
Charlotte Barnard	Dorothy Leigh	Hildegarde of Bingen	Charles Cowden Clarke
Lady Anne Barnard	Charlotte Lennox	Hrotsvit of Gandersheim	John Clare
Maria Barrell	Anna Leonowens	Zora Neale Hurston	Arthur Hugh Clough
Emilie Barrington	Alice Dixon Le Plongeon	Lucille Iremonger	Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mary Basset	Doris Lessing	Harriet Jacobs	Wilkie Collins
Elizabeth Bathurst	Elizabeth B. Lester	Anna Brownell Jameson	Auguste Comte
Henrietta Battier	Ada Leverson	Ruth Prawer Jhabvala	William Congreve
Nina Bawden	Amy Levy	Meiling Jin	Joseph Conrad
Amelia Beauclerc	Andrea Levy	Pauline Johnson	William John Courthope
Agnes Beaumont	Alethea Lewis	Jennifer Johnston	Abraham Cowley
Lydia Becker	Sarah Lewis	Elizabeth Jolley	William Cowper
Sybille Bedford	Isabella Lickbarrow	Molly Keane	John Wilson Croker
Patricia Beer	J. S. Anna Liddiard	Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette	Edmund Curll
Isabella Beeton	Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln	Doris Lessing	Dante Alighieri
Aphra Behn	Mary Linskill	Denise Levertov	Charles Darwin
Eva Mary Bell	Eliza Lynn Linton	Sarah Lewis, 1824 - 1880	Daniel Defoe
Gertrude Bell	Anne Lister	Anna Livia	Thomas De Quincey
Frances Bellerby	Janet Little	Deborah Norris Logan	Charles Dickens
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger	Penelope Lively	Mina Loy	Wilhelm Dilthey
Anna Maria Bennett	Liz Lochhead	Agnes Maule Machar	Benjamin Disraeli
Stella Benson	Anne Locke	Katherine Mansfield	Sydney Thompson Dobell
Theodora Benson	Norah Lofts	Marguerite de Navarre	John Donne
Inez Bensusan	Maria Theresa Longworth	Marie de France	Gustave Doré
Elizabeth Bentley	Roxburghe Lothian	Constance, Countess Markievicz	Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
Phyllis Bentley	Jane Loudon	Carson McCullers	John Dryden
Annie Besant	Marie Belloc Lowndes	Margaret Mead	Alexandre Dumas, père
Mary Matilda Betham	Mina Loy	Louisa Anne Meredith	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Matilda Betham-Edwards	Margaret Bingham, Countess Lucan	L. M. Montgomery	T. S. Eliot
Elizabeth Beverley	Lady Jane Lumley	Susanna Moodie	Ralph Waldo Emerson
L. S. Bevington	Edna Lyall	Marianne Moore	William Empson
Hester Biddle	Hannah Lynch	Toni Morrison	Henry Fielding
Mary Frances Billington	Edith Lyttelton	Iris Murdoch	Edward FitzGerald
Mabel Birchenough	Constance Lytton	Dervla Murphy	Gustave Flaubert
Isabella Bird	Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton	Sarojini Naidu	Ford Madox Ford
Clementina Black	Catharine Macaulay	Elma Napier	E. M. Forster
Helen Blackburn	Rose Macaulay	Grace Nichols	John Forster
E. Owens Blackburne	Shena Mackay	Edna O'Brien	Sir James George Frazer
Malorie Blackman	Cecily Mackworth	Kate O'Brien	James Anthony Froude
Caroline Blackwood	Sarah Macnaughtan	Emmuska, Baroness Orczy	Roger Fry
Isa Blagden	Katharine S. Macquoid	Sylvia Plath	John Galsworthy
Susanna Blamire	Judith Cowper Madan	Mary Prince	David Garrick
Barbara Blaugdone	Sara Maitland	Jean Rhys	Théophile Gautier
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington	Elizabeth Major	Adrienne Rich	André Gide
Mathilde Blind	Bathsua Makin	Laura Riding	William Godwin
Enid Blyton	Lucas Malet	Elizabeth Robins	Oliver Goldsmith
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon	Judith Man	Martin Ross	Thomas Gray
Elizabeth Bonhote	Delarivier Manley	Susanna Haswell Rowson	Henry Green
Frances Boothby	Ethel Mannin	Marie de Sévigné	Graham Greene
Lucy Boston	Anne Manning	George Sand	Thomas Hardy
Phyllis Bottome	Olivia Manning	Sappho	William Hazlitt
Jessie Boucherett	Katherine Mansfield	Olive Schreiner	Seamus Heaney
Dorothy Boulger	Hilary Mantel	Anna Maria van Schurman	Thomas Holcroft
Henrietta Maria Bowdler	Jane Marcet	Madeleine de Scudéry	Gerard Manley Hopkins
Elizabeth Bowen	Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach	Mary Seacole	Richard Hengist Horne
Bathsheba Bowers	Marie de France	Catharine Maria Sedgwick	A. E. Housman
Marjorie Bowen	Jessie White Mario	Olive Senior	Leigh Hunt
Lilian Bowes Lyon	Jean Marishall	Ling Shuhua	Aldous Huxley
Caroline Bowles	Constance, Countess Markievicz	Lydia Howard Sigourney	Henrik Ibsen
Muriel Box	Florence Marryat	Edith Somerville	Henry James
Elizabeth Boyd	Dora Marsden	Germaine de Staël	Samuel Johnson
Mary Boyle	Kate Marsden	Gertrude Stein	James Joyce
Mary Elizabeth Braddon	Anne Marsh	Anne Stevenson	John Keats
Mary Ann Cavendish Bradshaw	Catherine Marsh	Harriet Beecher Stowe	Rudyard Kipling
Anne Bradstreet	Ngaio Marsh	Catharine Parr Traill	Philip Larkin
Charlotte Mary Brame	Emma Marshall	Flora Tristan	William Law
Hannah Brand	M. Marsin	Sojourner Truth	D. H. Lawrence
Anna Brassey	Una Marson	Harriet Tytler	George Henry Lewes
Anna Eliza Bray	Mary Martin	Mercy Otis Warren	Wyndham Lewis
Angela Brazil	Mrs Martin	Timberlake Wertenbaker	John Locke
Jane Brereton	Harriet Martineau	Edith Wharton	Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, first Earl Lytton
Dorothy Brett	Damaris Masham	Phillis Wheatley	Thomas Babington, first Baron Macaulay
Ann Bridge	Mary Masters	Harriet E. Wilson	Sir Thomas Malory
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater	Helen Mathers	Frances Wright	Bernard Mandeville
Amelia Bristow	Eliza Kirkham Mathews	Susanna Wright	Christopher Marlowe
Vera Brittain	Flora Macdonald Mayor		Karl Marx
Anne Brontë	Charlotte McCarthy		Henry Mayhew
Charlotte Brontë	Candia McWilliam		Herman Melville
Emily Brontë	Medbh McGuckian		George Meredith
Charlotte Brooke	L. T. Meade		John Stuart Mill
Emma Frances Brooke	Mary Meeke		John Milton
Frances Brooke	Elizabeth Melvill		Thomas Moore
Christine Brooke-Rose	Louisa Anne Meredith		William Morris
Anita Brookner	Eliza Meteyard		John Henry Newman
Brigid Brophy	Charlotte Mew		Sir Isaac Newton
Rhoda Broughton	Alice Meynell		Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Frances Browne	Viola Meynell		John Norris
Mary Ann Browne	Jean Middlemass		George Orwell
Elizabeth Barrett Browning	Susan Miles		Thomas Otway
Mary Brunton	Lady Anna Miller		Thomas Paine, 1737 - 1809
Margaret Bryan	Betty Miller		Walter Pater
Mary Bryan	Christian Milne		Coventry Patmore
Bryher	Margaret Minifie		Petrarch
Cicely Bulstrode	Hope Mirrlees		Harold Pinter
Selina Bunbury	Naomi Mitchison		Edgar Allan Poe
Anne Burke	Mary Russell Mitford		Alexander Pope
Elizabeth Burnet	Nancy Mitford		Ezra Pound
Frances Hodgson Burnett	Gwen Moffat		Marcel Proust
Frances Burney	Deborah Moggach		Samuel Richardson
Sarah Harriet Burney	Mary Louisa Molesworth		John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester
Catharine Burton	Elizabeth Montagu		Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Elizabeth Bury	Lady Mary Wortley Montagu		Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Lady Charlotte Bury	Mary Seymour Montague		John Ruskin
Dorothy Bussy	Charlotte Montefiore		Sir Walter Scott
Josephine Butler	Susanna Moodie		William Shakespeare
Lady Eleanor Butler	Elizabeth Moody		George Bernard Shaw
Sarah Butler	Edith Mary Moore		Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mary Butts	Elinor Mordaunt		Richard Brinsley Sheridan
A. S. Byatt	Hannah More		Sir Philip Sidney
Augusta Ada Byron	Mary More		Tobias Smollett
Catherine Byron	Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan		Robert Southey
Medora Gordon Byron	Lady Ottoline Morrell		Edmund Spenser
Mildred Cable	Jan Morris		Herbert Spencer
Jessie Ellen Cadell	Penelope Mortimer		Sir Richard Steele
Mary Caesar	Celia Moss		Laurence Sterne
Kathleen Caffyn	Marion Moss		Jonathan Swift
Mona Caird	Henrietta Rouviere Mosse		Algernon Charles Swinburne
Elizabeth Cairns	Martha Moulsworth		John Millington Synge
Margaret Calderwood	Anne Mozley		Alfred Tennyson
Maria Callcott	Harriett Mozley		William Makepeace Thackeray
Ada Cambridge	Willa Muir		Dylan Thomas
Lady Colin Campbell	Henrietta Müller		Anthony Trollope
Dorothea Primrose Campbell	Georgina Munro		Horace Walpole
Ann Candler	Iris Murdoch		Evelyn Waugh
Joanna Cannan	Eunice Guthrie Murray		H. G. Wells
May Cannan	Grisell Murray		Oscar Wilde
Mary Carey	Sarah Murray		William Wordsworth
Rosa Nouchette Carey	Constance Naden		W. B. Yeats
Mary Carleton	Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne
Jane Welsh Carlyle	Elma Napier
Mary Carpenter	E. Nesbit
Dora Carrington	Grace Nichols
Leonora Carrington	Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Catherine Carswell	Florence Nightingale
Angela Carter	Elizabeth Nihell
Elizabeth Carter	Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale
Barbara Cartland	Charlotte Nooth
Lucy Cary	Caroline Norton
Mary Cary	Frances, Lady Norton
Margaret Catchpole	Frances Notley
Jane Cave	Charlotte Grace O'Brien
Lady Jane Cavendish	Kate O'Brien
Margaret Cavendish	Charlotte O'Conor Eccles
Dorothea Celesia	Adelaide O'Keeffe
Elizabeth Cellier	Frances O'Neill
Susanna Centlivre	Ann Oakley
Marianne Chambers	Eliza Ogilvy
Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny	Anne Ogle
Mary Chandler	Margaret Oliphant
Laura Ormiston Chant	Carola Oman
Charlotte Chanter	Amelia Opie
Hester Mulso Chapone	Emmuska, Baroness Orczy
Sarah Chapone	Dorothy Osborne
Charlotte Charke	Ouida
Elizabeth Charles	Jane Owen
Mary Charlton	Mary Oxlie
Georgiana Chatterton	Helen Oyeyemi
Katherine Chidley	Ruth Padel
Caroline Chisholm	Isabel Pagan
Mary Cholmondeley	Louise Page
Agatha Christie	Alicia Tyndal Palmer
Mary, Lady Chudleigh	Mary Palmer
Caryl Churchill	Christabel Pankhurst
Kate Clanchy	Emmeline Pankhurst
Jane Hume Clapperton	Sylvia Pankhurst
Emily Frederick Clark	Mollie Panter-Downes
Gillian Clarke	Julia Pardoe
Mary Cowden Clarke	Elizabeth Mary Parker
Olivia Clarke	Emma Parker
Agnes Mary Clerke	Mary Ann Parker
Ellen Mary Clerke	Bessie Rayner Parkes
Lady Anne Clifford	Katherine Parr
Caroline Clive	Susanna Parr
Frances Power Cobbe	Eliza Parsons
Elizabeth Cobbold	George Paston
Alison Cockburn	Mrs F. C. Patrick
Clara Codd	Frances Mary Peard
Frances Colenso	Susanna Pearson
Christabel Coleridge	Winifred Peck
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge	Mary Peisley
Sara Coleridge	Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
Jane Collier	Mary Penington
Mary Collier	Sarah, Lady Pennington
Mary Maria Colling	Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
An Collins	Emily Jane Pfeiffer
Mary Collyer	Katherine Philips
Ivy Compton-Burnett	Catherine Phillips
Anne Conway	Teresia Constantia Phillips
Ann Cook	Sarah, Lady Piers
Eliza Cook	Laetitia Pilkington
Cassandra Cooke	Winsome Pinnock
Catherine Cookson	Hester Lynch Piozzi
Elizabeth Cooper, d. 1761	Ruth Pitter
Lettice Cooper	Mary Pix
Maria Susanna Cooper	Jean Plaidy
Wendy Cope	Sylvia Plath
Marie Corelli	Annabella Plumptre
Frances Cornford	Anne Plumptre
Blanche Warre Cornish	C. E. Plumptre
Caroline Frances Cornwallis	Elizabeth Polwhele
Harriet Corp	Eleanor Anne Porden
Louisa Stuart Costello	Anna Maria Porter
Jeni Couzyn	Jane Porter
Rosalind Coward	Beatrix Potter
Hannah Cowley	Diana Primrose
Mary, Countess Cowper	Adelaide Procter
Sarah, Lady Cowper	Sheenagh Pugh
Edith Craig	Lady Hester Pulter
Isa Craig	Sally Purcell
Dinah Mulock Craik	Barbara Pym
Georgiana Craik	Ann Quin
Helen Craik	Ann Radcliffe
Ann Batten Cristall	Mary Ann Radcliffe
B. M. Croker	Kathleen Raine
Margaret Croker	Eleanor Rathbone
May Crommelin	Hannah Mary Rathbone
Richmal Crompton	Clara Reeve
Camilla Crosland	Amber Reeves
Victoria Cross	Marion Reid
Catherine Crowe	Mary Renault
Hannah Cullwick	Ruth Rendell
Nancy Cunard	Frances Reynolds
Lady Margaret Cunningham	Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
Catherine Cuthbertson	Jean Rhys
Alicia D'Anvers	Dorothy Richardson
Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre	Elizabeth Richardson
Charlotte Dacre	Charlotte Riddell
Anne Damer	Maria Riddell
Clemence Dane	Anne Ridler
Sarah Daniels	Elizabeth Rigby
Ella D'Arcy	Joan Riley
Mary Whateley Darwall	Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Elizabeth Daryush	Jane Robe
Selina Davenport	Emma Roberts
Emily Davies	Margaret Roberts
Sarah Davy	Michèle Roberts
Mary Davys	Radagunda Roberts
Jennifer Dawson	E. Arnot Robertson
Maria De Fleury	Elizabeth Robins
Elizabeth De la Pasture	A. Mary F. Robinson
E. M. Delafield	Emma Robinson
Shelagh Delaney	Isabella Hamilton Robinson
Mary Delany	F. Mabel Robinson
Elizabeth Delaval	Mary Robinson
Ethel M. Dell	Regina Maria Roche
Charlotte Dempster	Margaret Roper
Charlotte Despard	Amanda McKittrick Ros
Mary Deverell	Catharine Colace Ross
Anne Devlin	Martin Ross
Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire	Mrs Ross
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire	Christina Rossetti
Mary Angela Dickens	Frances Arabella Rowden
Monica Dickens	Elizabeth Singer Rowe
E. A. Dillwyn	J. K. Rowling
Florence Dixie	Susanna Haswell Rowson
Ella Hepworth Dixon	Naomi Royde-Smith
Sarah Dixon	Maude Royden
Susannah Dobson	Bernice Rubens
Anne Docwra	Berta Ruck
George Douglas	Carol Rumens
Lady Eleanor Douglas	Dora Russell
Ménie Muriel Dowie	Jessie Russell
Harriet Downing	Lady Rachel Russell
Anne Dowriche	Lady Margaret Sackville
Margaret Drabble	Vita Sackville-West
Judith Drake	Margaret Sandbach
May Drummond	Mary Savage
Dorothea Du Bois	Sarah Savage
Daphne Du Maurier	Ethel Savi
Susan Du Verger	Dorothy L. Sayers
Frances Isabella Duberly	Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
Lucie Duff Gordon	Olive Schreiner
Carol Ann Duffy	Gladys Henrietta Schütze
Maureen Duffy	Caroline Scott
Eliza Dunlop	Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
Helen Dunmore	Mary Scott
Nell Dunn	Sarah Scott
Toru Dutt	E. J. Scovell
Ketaki Kushari Dyson	Mary Seacole
Emily Eden	Anna Seward
Maria Edgeworth	Anna Sewell
May Edginton	Elizabeth Sewell
Amelia B. Edwards	Mary Sewell
George Egerton	Anne Sexton
George Eliot	Jo Shapcott
Queen Elizabeth I	Evelyn Sharp
Lady Charlotte Elliot	Jane Sharp
Charlotte Elliott	Flora Shaw
Grace Elliott	Hester Shaw
Sarah Stickney Ellis	Janet Schaw
Elizabeth Elstob	Mary Shelley
Anne Katharine Elwood	Nan Shepherd
Buchi Emecheta	Frances Sheridan
Anne Enright	Mary Martha Sherwood
Ephelia	Elizabeth Shirley
Eugenia	Emily Shirreff
Anne Evans	Arabella Shore
Katharine Evans	Louisa Catherine Shore
Margiad Evans	Margaret Emily Shore
Bernardine Evaristo	Mrs Showes
Juliana Horatia Ewing	Penelope Shuttle
Mary Fage	Elizabeth Siddal
Ruth Fainlight	Ethel Sidgwick
Zoë Fairbairns	Dora Sigerson
Emily Faithfull	Elizabeth Postuma Simcoe
Anna Maria Falconbridge	Edith J. Simcox
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland	May Sinclair
Violet Fane	Edith Sitwell
Ann, Lady Fanshawe	Felicia Skene
Catherine Fanshawe	Ann Masterman Skinn
U. A. Fanthorpe	Eleanor Sleath
Eleanor Farjeon	Constance Smedley
Florence Farr	Menella Bute Smedley
Millicent Garrett Fawcett	Charlotte Smith
Eliza Fay	Dodie Smith
Elaine Feinstein	Elizabeth Smith (1776 - 1826)
Alison Fell	Lucy Toulmin Smith
Margaret Fell	Stevie Smith
Elizabeth Fenton	Zadie Smith
Eliza Fenwick	Ethel Smyth
Mary Ferrar	Harriet Smythies
Susan Ferrier	Susan Smythies
Fidelia	Edith Somerville
Michael Field	Mary Somerville
Sarah Fielding	Joanna Southcott
Celia Fiennes	Anne, Lady Southwell
Eva Figes	Githa Sowerby
Anne Finch	Muriel Spark
Ann Fisher	Rachel Speght
Mary Fisher	Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Penelope Fitzgerald	Emily Spender
Eliza Fletcher	Jane Squire
Mary Bosanquet Fletcher	Christopher St John
Rosita Forbes	Freya Stark
Isabella Ormston Ford	Mariana Starke
Charlotte Forman	Flora Annie Steel
Margaret Forster	Anna Steele
Mrs E. M. Foster	Anne Steele
Jessie Fothergill	G. B. Stern
Martha Fowke	Anne Stevenson
Anne Francis	Mary Stewart
Julia Frankau	Elizabeth Stirredge
Pamela Frankau	Mary Stockdale
Antonia Fraser	Elizabeth Stone
Christina Fraser-Tytler	Sarah Stone
Elizabeth Freke	Charlotte Stopes
Mary Frere	Marie Stopes
Kate Parry Frye	Lesley Storm
Georgiana Fullerton	Mary Stott
Monica Furlong	Julia Strachey
Sarah Fyge	Ray Strachey
Jane Gardam	Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
Sarah Gardner	Noel Streatfeild
Constance Garnett	Hesba Stretton
Elizabeth Gaskell	Julia Stretton
Margaret Gatty	Agnes Strickland
Mary Gawthorpe	Elizabeth Strickland
Maggie Gee	Jan Struther
Pam Gems	Elizabeth Strutt
Dorothea Gerard	Lady Arbella Stuart
Emily Gerard	Lady Louisa Stuart
Karen Gershon	Maud Sulter
Phebe Gibbes	Leah Sumbel
Stella Gibbons	Rosemary Sutcliff
Agnes Giberne	Dorothy Sidney Spencer, Countess of Sunderland
Ann Taylor Gilbert	Annie S. Swan
Elizabeth Gilding	Anna Swanwick
Hélène Gingold	Henrietta Sykes
Katherine Bruce Glasier	Catherine Talbot
Hannah Glasse	Eleanor Tatlock
Evelyn Glover	Jemima Tautphoeus
Elinor Glyn	Ann Martin Taylor
Rumer Godden	Elizabeth Taylor
Charlotte Godley	Harriet Taylor
Ann Gomersall	Helen Taylor
Maud Gonne	Jane Taylor
Elizabeth Sarah Gooch	Mary Taylor
Anna Gordon	Elizabeth Teft
Catherine Gore	Edith Templeton
Eva Gore-Booth	Emma Tennant
Elizabeth Goudge	Tabitha Tenney
Sarah Grand	Josephine Tey
Anne Grant	Ann Thicknesse
Elizabeth Grant	Gertrude Thimelby
Clotilde Graves	Winefrid Thimelby
Christian Gray	Angela Thirkell
Sarah Green	Elizabeth Thomas
Kate Greenaway	Elizabeth Thomas, b. 1771
Dora Greenwell	Flora Thompson
Germaine Greer	Alice Thornton
Augusta Gregory	Katherine Cecil Thurston
Catherine Maria Grey	Mary Tighe
Maria Grey	Henrietta Euphemia Tindal
Constantia Grierson	Annie Tinsley
Elizabeth Griffith	Elizabeth Tipper
Elizabeth Grymeston	Elizabeth Tollet
Elizabeth Gunning	Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Susannah Gunning	Sue Townsend
H. D.	Catharine Parr Traill
Martha Hale	Anna Trapnel
Anne Halkett	P. L. Travers
Anna Maria Hall	Rebecca Travers
Radclyffe Hall	Iris Tree
Elizabeth Ham	Viola Tree
Cicely Hamilton	Violet Trefusis
Eliza Mary Hamilton	Rose Tremain
Elizabeth Hamilton	Melesina Trench
Janet Hamilton	Sarah Trimmer
Mary Agnes Hamilton	Frances Trollope
Nina Hamnett	Frances Eleanor Trollope
Irene Handl	Joanna Trollope
Elizabeth Hands	Catharine Trotter
Mary Harcourt	Una Troubridge
Iza Duffus Hardy	Charlotte Maria Tucker
Mary Anne Duffus Hardy	Susan Tweedsmuir
Margaret Harkness	Margaret Tyler
Brilliana, Lady Harley	Katharine Tynan
Beatrice Harraden	Elizabeth Oxenbridge, Lady Tyrwhit
Jane Ellen Harrison	Harriet Tytler
Jane Harvey	Sarah Tytler
Isabella Neil Harwood	Evelyn Underhill
Ann Hatton	Alison Uttley
Frances Ridley Havergal	Anna Jane Vardill
Cassandra, Lady Hawke	Sophie Veitch
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins	Margaret Veley
Ann Hawkshaw	Queen Victoria
Mary Hays	Linda Villari
Matilda Hays	Joan Vokins
Eliza Haywood	Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth Helme	Ethel Lilian Voynich
Felicia Hemans	Helen Waddell
Lady Lucy Herbert	Priscilla Wakefield
Mary Herberts	Lucy Walford
Caroline Herschel	Annie Louisa Walker
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford	Elizabeth Walker
Elizabeth Hervey, 1748 - 1820	Lady Mary Walker
Georgette Heyer	Ann Wall
Elizabeth Heyrick	Doreen Wallace
Emily Hickey	Eglinton Wallace
Rose Hickman	Michelene Wandor
Patricia Highsmith	Mary Ward
Isabel Hill	Mary Augusta Ward
Selima Hill	Anna Letitia Waring
Susan Hill	Marina Warner
Elizabeth Hincks	Sylvia Townsend Warner
John Oliver Hobbes	Elizabeth Warren
Margaret Hoby	Jane Warton
Frances Sarah Hoey	Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick
Barbara Hofland	Elisabeth Wast
Fanny Holcroft	Sarah Waters
Catherine Holland	Rosamund Marriott Watson
Margaret Holford, the elder	Susanna Watts
Margaret Holford, the younger	Harriet Shaw Weaver
Constance Holme	Beatrice Webb
Winifred Holtby	Mary Webb
Elizabeth Hooton	Augusta Webster
Laurence Hope	Julia Wedgwood
Susanna Hopton	Ellen Weeton
Frances Horovitz	Fay Weldon
Matilda Charlotte Houstoun	Dorothy Wellesley
Elizabeth Jane Howard	Helena Wells
Julia Ward Howe	Agnes Wenman
Anna Mary Howitt	Anne Wentworth
Mary Howitt	Patricia Wentworth
Catherine Hubback	Timberlake Wertenbaker
E. M. Hull	Mary Wesley
Anna Hume	Susanna Wesley
Mary Catherine Hume	Jane West
Sophia Hume	Rebecca West
C. E. Humphry	Anne Wharton
Violet Hunt	Anne Wheathill
Rachel Hunter	Agnes Wheeler
Lucy Hutchinson	Anna Wheeler
Catherine Hutton	Dorothy Whipple
Lucy Hutton	Antonia White
Elspeth Huxley	Dorothy White
Elizabeth Inchbald	Elizabeth White
Jean Ingelow	Roma White
Kathleen E. Innes	Anne Whitehead
Anne Irwin	Isabella Whitney
Elizabeth Isham	Joan Whitrow
Frances Jacson	Anna Wickham
Maria Elizabetha Jacson	Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
Muriel Jaeger	Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
Elinor James	Anna Williams
P. D. James	Helen Maria Williams
Anna Brownell Jameson	Jane Williams
Storm Jameson	Sarah Williams
Kathleen Jamie	Amabel Williams-Ellis
Harriett Jay	Harriette Wilson
Ann Jebb	Romer Wilson
Ann Jellicoe	John Strange Winter
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin	Jeanette Winterson
Elizabeth Jenkins	Jane Wiseman
Elizabeth Jennings	Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan
F. Tennyson Jesse	Hannah Wolley
Mary Anne Jevons, the elder	Mary Wollstonecraft
Geraldine Jewsbury	Ellen Wood
Maria Jane Jewsbury	Emma Caroline Wood
Sophia Jex-Blake	Sophia Woodfall
Meiling Jin	A. Woodfin
Jane Johnson	Virginia Woolf
Pamela Hansford Johnson	Emma Jane Worboise
Ellen Johnston	Dorothy Wordsworth
Christian Isobel Johnstone	Frances Wright
E. B. C. Jones	Mehetabel Wright
Mary Jones	Lady Mary Wroth
Elizabeth Joscelin	Ann Yearsley
Elizabeth Justice	Charlotte Yonge
Julian of Norwich	E. H. Young
Sarah Kane	Mary Julia Young

Past Releases

Initial Release

The 1,077 writers listed below—as British women, men and other women—had their own entries in the initial release of Orlando in June 2006. More entries are added twice yearly and are listed under their dates of release.

British Women Writers with Entries

Other Women Writers

Male Writers

Summary of Content (initial release)

1,077 entries (844 British women writers, 164 male writers, 113 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted); 12,739 free-standing chronology entries; 19,555 bibliographical listings; 1,893,280 tags; 5,950,855 words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2007

New Author Entries

Anne Locke, c. 1533 - maybe c. 1593, probable author of earliest sonnet sequence in English
Elizabeth Moody, perhaps early 1740s - 1814, poet and early periodical reviewer
Henrietta Maria Bowdler, 1750 - 1830, the true inventor of bowdlerising Shakespeare
Anne Grant, 1755 - 1838, Scottish woman of letters, huge networker, author of book on colonial New York province
Selina Bunbury, 1802 - 82, whose "writings display a loving and respectful preoccupation with female characters and themes"
Fanny Fern, 1811 - 72, one of the most popular US writers of the nineteenth century
Sarah Tytler, 1827 - 1914, prolific Scottish author of domestic and often historical novels
Isabella Bird, 1831 - 1904, prominent late-Victorian travel writer
Kate Chopin, 1850 - 1904, US feminist writer particularly well-known for The Awakening
John Strange Winter, 1856 - 1911, popular for her military novels, unusual for a woman
Katharine Tynan, 1859 - 1931, leading figure in the Irish Literary Revival
George Paston, 1860 - 1936, feminist novelist and playwright, biographer, and writer on women's literary history
Victoria Cross, 1868 - 1952, whose writing rebels against the sexual and other conventions of her own day, yet has remained unfashionable in later generations
Eleanor Rathbone, 1872 - 1946, conservative feminist, crucial proponent of family allowances, described as one of the leading politicians of the early twentieth century
Enid Bagnold, 1889 - 1981, novelist and playwright
Willa Muir, 1890 - 1970, Scottish writer and translator (most famously of Kafka), overshadowed by her poet husband
Mary Butts, 1890 - 1937, modernist novelist, poet, and autobiographer
Muriel Box, 1905 - 91, playwright, film-writer, first British woman film director, and author of a feminist post-nuclear science fiction
Una Marson, 1905 - 65, Jamaican woman of letters and publicist in Britain of Caribbean culture, early proponent of global feminism and black female identity
Jean Plaidy, 1906 - 93, immensely popular author of over 200 novels under seven pseudonyms, best-known for historical romance
Mollie Panter-Downes, 1906 - 97, author of a novel which has been called one of the best in the twentieth century
Marghanita Laski, 1915 - 88, woman of letters and public intellectual
Penelope Mortimer, 1918 - 99, novelist and writer in many genres
Elizabeth Jane Howard, born 1923, best-known as a novelist and autobiographer
Ann Jellicoe, born 1927, innovative playwright and pioneer of huge-cast community theatre
Nawal El Saadawi, born 1931, Egyptian feminist writer and voice for Islamic women
Antonia Fraser, born 1932, historical biographer (particularly of women) and detective-story writer
Rose Tremain, born 1943, novelist
Anne Devlin, born 1951, Belfast-born playwright

New Life Screens

Margaret Tyler, first woman in England to publish a romance and the first English translator direct from Spanish romance, in the later sixteenth century
Jane Owen, Roman Catholic religious writer of the seventeenth century
Lady Margaret Cunningham, remarkable early seventeenth-century Scottish autobiographer and religious writer
Mary Fage, earlier seventeenth-century author of anagrams and acrostics on the names of the British establishment
Judith Man, who in 1640 translated, abridged, and published her version of a popular Latin heroic romance
Elizabeth Avery, religious polemicist and autobiographer of the mid-seventeenth century
Susanna Parr, mid-seventeenth-century religious apologist and polemicist
Frances Boothby, the sole woman to have a play produced in a public theatre before Aphra Behn
Elizabeth Tipper, late-seventeenth-century poet and journalist
Sarah Davy, later-seventeenth-century Independent or Baptist autobiographer
Barbara Blaugdone, later seventeenth-century Quaker minister and autobiographer
Sarah Butler, Irish writer who produced, in the early eighteenth century, tales from legendary national history under the guise of fiction
Ann Cook, mid-eighteenth-century author of an imaginative cookery-book which includes poetry, and story-telling
Marianne Chambers, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novelist and dramatist
Mrs. F. C. Patrick, Irish novelist of the 1790s
Anne Burke, successful novelist who began publishing at the end of the eighteenth century
Frances O'Neill, Irish poet of the later eighteenth and very early nineteenth century
Charlotte Nooth, author during the early nineteenth century of poetry, a remarkable novel, and a translation of a text against racial prejudice

Other Additions

214 new free-standing chronology entries on such contextual matters as:

the Iliad
the Olympic Games
the British national postal service
bank notes
the appointment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi as professor of mathematics in 1750
street lighting
Madame Tussaud's
Reuter's news service
the coinage of the word "allergy"
Grace Annie Lockhart's attainment of the first university degree by a woman in the British Empire
Annie Jump Cannon's receipt of the first honorary doctorate by a woman from Oxford University
the British Socialist Party
the Greenham Common women's peace camp
the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi of Iran

138 existing author entries were also updated or enhanced. 143 existing free-standing chronology entries were also updated or enhanced

Summary of Content

29 entries (26 British women writers, 3 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted); 18 life screens; 198 free-standing chronology entries; 821 bibliographical listings; 83,282 tags; 289,619 words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2007

New Author 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"

Other Additions

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

Summary of Content

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)

New: January 2008

New Author Entries

Margaret Roper, 1505-44, Renaissance letter-writer and translator of Erasmus, still chiefly famous for her behaviour at her father's martyrdom
Anna Hume, fl. 1639-65, Scottish translator of Petrarch
Mary Latter, 1722-77, miscellaneous writer, author of an unacted tragedy and of combative satire in an ingenious variety of forms
Charlotte McCarthy, fl. 1745-68, Irish author of a prose romance, poetry, and political and theological works
Susanna Blamire, 1747-94, poet who wrote in English, Scots, and in Cumberland dialect
Alethea Lewis, 1749-1827, didactic novelist with a strain of creative unconventionality. She also published essays
Frances Jacson, 1754-1842, novelist of women's circumstances and feelings, author of a lost diary
Maria Elizabetha Jacson, 1755-1829, writer on the science of botany and on gardening
Anna Margaretta Larpent, 1758-1832, diarist and cultural commentator, unofficial assistant to her husband in his post as Licenser of Plays
Leah Sumbel, 1762-1829, (who changed her name from Mary Wells on her somewhat short-lived conversion to Judaism), actress, journalist, stage writer, and memoirist
Eliza Kirkham Mathews, 1772-1802, author of poetry, two novels (other novels generally listed as hers are by Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins), and little books for children
Adelaide O'Keeffe, 1776-1865, Irish writer famous for verse for children but less known for her remarkable historical novels and biblical paraphrases. In indigent old age she told the Royal Literary Society that its approach to funding authors was all wrong
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, 1778-1856, autobiographer and writer on aesthetic theory and theology. As a child she wrote fake Elizabethan texts and buried them for future ages to discover
Jane Williams, 1806-85, activist on behalf of Welsh culture, who published history, biography, and political argument, as well as a biographical dictionary of literary women
Georgiana Fullerton, 1812-85, one of the leading Roman Catholic novelists of the nineteenth century
Frances Browne, 1816-79, blind writer from Ireland, author of poems and fiction, best-known for her fairy-tale collection Granny's Wonderful Chair
Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 1823-93, mixed-race American writer and activist for emancipation and women's rights, who spent years in Canada and was the first woman to edit a newspaper there
Annie Louisa Walker, 1836-1907, miscellaneous writer, whose poetry and first novel interestingly reflect for English readers her youthful years in Canada
Rosa Nouchette Carey, 1840-1909, popular domestic and young people's novelist, proponent of meaningful work for women
Evelyn Underhill, 1875-1941, mystic and writer on mysticism, who also produced novels, short stories, poetry, and biography
Mary Agnes Hamilton, 1882-1966, left-wing politician and author of novels, biography, memoirs, and political analysis
Lady Cynthia Asquith, 1887-1960, diarist (of World War I), autobiographer, and miscellaneous writer
Ella K. Maillart, 1903-97, Swiss traveller, travel-writer, journalist, memoirist, and photographer, who wrote her later works in English
Julia O'Faolain, born 1932, Irish novelist and short-story writer, whose fiction often depicts the contact zone between different cultures, and whose non-fiction includes women's history
Julia Kristeva, born 1941, French theorist of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the relations between literature and visual art. She has recently become a novelist and biographer

Other Additions

80 new free-standing chronology entries

153 existing author entries were also updated or enhanced. 62 existing free-standing chronology entries were also updated or enhanced

Summary of Content

25 entries (20 British women writers, 5 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted); 80 free-standing chronology entries; 650 bibliographical listings; 51,468 tags; 181,984 words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2008

New Author 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 Shakespearand 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.

New Entry Point

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.

Other Additions

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.

Summary of Content

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).

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.

Entries Enhanced

These are a tiny proportion of all the entries revised (131 in total). Run-of-the-mill additions (new editions, new scholarship, sale prices, film versions, etc.) are not listed here.

Rhoda Broughton, Bessie Rayner Parkes (and others): Detail added through work on the highly sociable Marie Belloc Lowndes.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Mention of Strange Music, a new novel by Black British writer Laura Fish, which juxtaposes part of the poet's life with those of two women on her family's Jamaican estate.
Dorothea Primrose Campbell: New information from the memoirs of the Rev. Adam Clarke, who met DPC on a preaching tour of the Shetlands and whose son's family later, disastrously, invited her south to England.
Harriet Corp: Coverage of her earliest book (first now firmly identified as such), Interesting Conversations, 1805, of which her authorship has not until now been clear.
Shelagh Delaney: Comments on getting A Taste of Honey past the censors at the Lord Chamberlain's office, from the British Library exhibition The Golden Generation, British Theatre 1945-1968.
Carol Ann Duffy: One of her poems was banned from schools as allegedly an incitement to crime: Duffy retaliated with a poem about crime in Shakespeare.
Eliza Fenwick: Further information emerging about her later life in the USA and Canada.
Sarah Fielding: A new attribution has been put forward.
Anne Finch: Mention of the exciting possibility that she wrote the libretto for John Blow's Venus and Adonis, billed as "the first English opera".
Frances Ridley Havergal: Mention of a unique copy of a previously unknown tiny book from the 1890s, putting her verses together with biblical texts and flower pictures for each day of the week.
Eliza Haywood: Expansion and complication of the entry from more extended use of Patrick Spedding's exhaustive bibliography.
P. D. James: Her latest novel has drawn a special kind of comment because of her age: eighty-eight.
Bryony Lavery: Her stage adaptation of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.
Doris Lessing: Account of her Nobel Prize speech.
L. M. Montgomery: Her grand-daughter's revelation that depression led her to suicide.
E. Nesbit: Mention of a tiny, undated, illustrated book-cum-greeting-card published by Raphael Tuck, undated, containing a poem by her.
George Orwell: The annual Orwell Prize, and the posting of his second world war diaries as a blog.
Timberlake Wertenbaker: Additions on both her extraordinary parents, and her father's death.

Other Additions

40 contextual events were updated or enhanced.

84 new free-standing contextual events on such matters as:

the first recorded instance of a coffee house building a library of books for the enjoyment of its patrons
the manuscript book of poetry and prose written by the seventeenth-century Dorothy Calthorpe
the licensing of Anne Smythies in 1743 to cure the "king's evil"
the earliest-known Australian imprint (a playbill, 1796)
the bill that outlawed the use of climbing children in chimney-sweeping, 1840
the first recorded pictorial Christmas card, 1843
the appointment of the first professional nurse to work in industry, 1878
the International Congress of Women, 1899
several events dealing with the suffrage struggle
the first award of the Hawthornden Prize for literature, 1919
the introduction of the long-playing record, 1948
the devaluation of the pound sterling, 1967
several events dealing with the 2008 financial crisis
the election of Barack Obama as the first-ever black president of the United States

Summary of Content

25 entries (20 British women writers, 5 other women writers); 84 free-standing chronology entries; 563 new bibliographical listings; 59,764 new tags; 836,630 words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2009

New Author Entries

Elizabeth Walker, 1623-90. Miscellaneous religious writer and memoirist.
Elizabeth Burnet, 1661-1709. Diarist, letter-writer, Latitudinarian devotional writer and political lobbyist.
Sarah, Lady Piers, 1667 or after - 1719. Poet writing on theatrical and political topics.
Elisabeth Wast, before 1670 - before 1724. Scottish religious autobiographer. Standard reference sources give her name as 'West' and misreport by forty years the date of her single, highly influential, text.
Elizabeth Justice, 1703-52. Author of two unusual works, a travel-book about Russia and an autobiographical novel.
Mary Palmer, 1716-94. Author of dialogues in the Devon dialect.
Frances Reynolds, 1729-1807. Writer of aesthetic theory, memoirs, and poems.
Elizabeth Hervey, c. 1748-1820. Novelist, often wrongly supposed to be the central target of burlesques by her half-brother William Beckford of popular women's fiction.
Caroline Herschel, 1750-1848. Celebrated astronomer; also science writer, diarist and memoirist.
Maria Riddell, 1772-1802. Scottish poet, travel-writer, anthologist, friend and first published critic of Robert Burns.
Ann Hawkshaw, ?1812-1885. Writer of historical poems set in periods of heroic struggle.
Laura Ormiston Chant, 1848-1923, poet and writer about the social purity crusade and other gender concerns.
L. S. Bevington, 1845-95. Poet and anarchist-communist activist. Her poetry is comparatively well known, her political writing neglected.
Harriett Jay, 1857-1932. Author of popular political novels about conditions in Ireland, and dramatist in collaboration with her better-remembered stepfather, Robert Buchanan.
Rosita Forbes, 1890-1967. Travel-writer whose books about Arab, South American and Caribbean places often merge with memoir, biography, and political writing.
Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, male novelist, poet, and non-fiction writer best-known for his speculative dystopian fiction Brave New World.
Dylan Thomas, 1914-53. Male Welsh poet who also published essays, short stories, and a famous radio dramatic piece, Under Milk Wood.
Monica Furlong, 1930-2003. Feminist churchwoman, theologian, and fiction writer, activist in the struggle for the ordination of women in the Anglican church.
Luce Irigaray, born 1930, important French feminist theorist and proponent of écriture feminine.
Ruth Fainlight, born 1931. Belatedly recognized poet, translator, short-story writer, a personal friend of Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, and especially Sylvia Plath.
Hélène Cixous, born 1937. One of the key French feminist theorists; author too of fiction, drama, poetry, and memoirs.
Ruth Padel, born 1946. Poet, classical scholar and critic, anthologist and environmental writer: recently, briefly, the first female Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Penelope Shuttle, born 1947. Poet of the female body; also author, with her poet partner Peter Redgrove, of experimental fiction and of The Wise Wound, a study of menstruation.
Louise Page, born 1955. Dramatist of closely-observed human relationships.
Sarah Daniels, born 1956. Radical feminist playwright and radio dramatist. The first living woman to have a play performed at the National Theatre.

Entries Enhanced

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

Jane Austen: more on her siblings and on the extraordinary Austen spin-off industry.
Anita Brookner: not only her new novel, Strangers, but journalist Mark Lawson's unusual recantation
of his former Brookner-phobia.
Agatha Christie: recent manuscript discoveries, and results of research into the decline of her literary vocabulary in old age, suggesting conclusions about her health (probable Alzheimer's) and the processes of composition.
Caryl Churchill: the furore around her controversial new play, Seven Jewish Children.
Anne Conway: a work by her offered for sale at four thousand eight hundred pounds.
Carol Ann Duffy: selection as first British woman poet laureate; another furore around her first poem in that position, "Politics".
U. A. Fanthorpe: at the time of her death she was being backed for the laureateship by Duffy, the successful candidate.
Marie Madeleine de Lafayette: the extraordinary career of La Princesse de Cléves as a symbol of resistance to French university cuts, precipitated by snide comments on the novel from President Nicolas
Sarkozy.
Eliza Lynn Linton: a letter offered for sale in which she thanks "Mark Rutherford" for his good opinion of her controversial novel Joshua Davidson.
Sylvia Plath: more on her relationship with Ruth Fainlight; her son's suicide.
Anne Stevenson: more on her contact with Ted Hughes over her life of Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Townsend Warner: now quoted, a late, irresistible passage from Lolly Willowes.

Other Additions

60 contextual events were updated or enhanced.

87 new free-standing contextual events on topics connected with new author entries, from seventeenth-century Scottish religion and politics, through the nineteenth-century anarchist movement, to the twentieth-century campaign for women's ordination. Others relate to printing and publishing, changing views on women's nature and status, publications by writers of both sexes who do not for the moment rate a whole entry, and other aspects of politics, literature, and cultural change.

Summary of Content

25 entries (21 British women writers, 4 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted—and 2 male writers); 87 free-standing chronology entries; 624 bibliographical listings; 51,775 tags; 197,856 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2010

New Author Entries

Ann Fisher, 1719-78, grammarian (uniquely for a woman at this date) and educational writer.
Margaret Holford the elder, ?1757-1834, novelist and playwright: mother of a poet of the same name, one of whose works is still often wrongly ascribed to her.
Margaret Holford the younger, (later Holford), 1778-1852, poet whose first romance narrative gave her a fame not equalled by her later poetry, fiction, or play, or her earlier Oriental tale, despite her tireless efforts to further her career.
Ada Cambridge, 1844-1926, English-Australian poet, novelist, and autobiographer. One of Australia's earliest poets, and a significant chronicler of colonial Australia.
Lucy Walford, 1845-1915, novelist and short-story writer, Scottish but settled in London, creator of feisty heroines who are typically tamed by experience.
Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936, short-story writer, poet, children's writer, and journalist who also produced novels, political writing, and an autobiography. Chiefly known, to the detriment of his once immense popularity, as the depictor of British India.
Roma White, 1866-1930 (real name Blanche Oram, later Winder), popular novelist who often sets her stories in the theatre world or in exotic distant countries.
Arnold Bennett, 1867-1931, literary and popular novelist and miscellaneous writer. Remembered as a leader of the school of realist fiction, especially for his works set in the Potteries of Staffordshire.
Ruby M. Ayres, 1883-1955. Popular romantic novelist whose phenomenal sales (of at least 150 novels written at a rate of up to 20,000 words a day) continued with new reprints in the late twentieth century.
Gladys Henrietta Schütze, 1884-1946, novelist and miscellaneous writer whose almost total oblivion must surely be due to the foreign name which harassed her in her lifetime and inspired her most famous work, Mrs. Fischer's War, 1930.
Hélène Barcynska, 1886-1964. Popular novelist who turned to autobiography and memoir after her exceptional output and popularity began to decline as tastes changed.

Entries Enhanced

Entries enhanced (not listed here are the entries, among them those on Anna Letitia Barbauld, Catherine Carswell, Elizabeth Heyrick, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Susannah Watts, which have been transformed by use of recent biographies): Run-of-the-mill additions (new editions, new scholarship, sale prices, film versions, etc.) are not listed here.

Margaret Atwood: not only her latest novel but her up-to-the-minute publicizing of it.
E. M. Delafield: the baffled reception of her hit comedy To See Ourselves in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Lucie Duff Gordon: the publication (and cutting-edge marketing) of a novel which is based on her travel experiences but which paints an unfriendly picture of her, Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing, July 2009.
Carol Ann Duffy: some of her activities as Poet Laureate.
Maria Edgeworthand Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck: the appearance in the sale room of the latter's copy of the former's Castle Rackrent.
Celia Fiennes: entry revised in light of research by Frank Parker: contrary to standard sources, she was younger than her one surviving sister.
Sarah Stickney Ellis: a previously unknown broadside printing of her poem to raise money for a new chapel in Hoddesdon, 1846.
Samuel Johnson: research by John Stone shows that the first translator of Rasselas into Spanish was Inés Joyes y Blake, a feminist who used her version as the vehicle with which to publish a Wollstonecraft-type essay on women's status.
Elinor Mordaunt: some notice of Times Literary Suplement reviews by the young Virginia Woolf.
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan: something on her important Athenæum reviewing.
Sylvia Pankhurst: more on her writing and paintings on Women Workers of England and on the website SylviaPankhurst.com.
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck: previously unknown letters revealing her friendships with Margaret Holford, senior, and with the scientist John Murray (and more of her involvement with amateur science).
Menella Bute Smedley: her birthdate has been corrected (all standard sources have confused her with an elder sister who died); her godfather was the brother of writer Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins. An inheritance of five thousand pounds in 1855 must have changed her life. Thanks to Tom Bellas for new information here.
Githa Sowerby: the discovery of a last play, later than any known before. (This information from Patricia Riley's biography, 2009, which will be more extensively used in the next Orlando update.)
Violet Trefusis: the fascination of Michael Holroyd with her novel Echo.
Alice Thornton: the re-emergence of two volumes of her "lost" and their purchase by the British Library at the Peyraud sale (which also enabled additions about other writers, 1760-1820).

Other Additions

65 contextual events were updated or enhanced. Some track the ongoing revisions in public knowledge of history. Orlando's record of the historic US Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, which made anti-abortion laws illegal in the USA, was amended to take note of the gradual modification and watering-down of this decision - and of the fact that Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" of this decision, was converted during the 1990s from the pro-choice to the anti-abortion campaign.

92 newly added contextual events include such recent headlines as the near-collapse of the British banking system, and the sale in New York of the Peyraud collection (the world's largest private antiquarian book collection, in which writings by British women predominated). They include, too, important material previously missed, like Lady Isabella King's little-known experiment in women's community living, launched in 1816, inspired by Sarah Scott's novel Millenium Hall.

Homepage: minor changes to the entry points are designed to make the system more user-friendly.

Summary of Content

11 entries (9 British women writers, 1 other woman writer—listed twice if their nationality shifted—and 2 male writers); 92 free-standing chronology entries; 376 new bibliographical listings; 32,083 new tags; 703,803 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2010

New Author Entries

Elizabeth Oxenbridge, Lady Tyrwhit, c. 1510-78, early Protestant compiler of a book of private prayers (including hymns, prayers, and metrical psalms), some perhaps of her own writing.
Elizabeth Postuma Simcoe, 1762-1850, diarist and letter-writer whose place in history is owed to her meticulously sketched and vividly described accounts of the colony of Upper Canada.
Emily Frederick Clark, probably before 1780 - after 1833, novelist, painter, poet, and claimant of foreign royal descent, who wrote to support her mother and sisters. The single most persistent petitioner of the Royal Literary Fund.
Emma Frances Brooke, 1844-1926, significant socialist-feminist, undeservedly forgotten or remembered only for her novel A Superfluous Woman, 1894. Her other novels and non-fiction express fiercely unconventional views on questions of politics, religion, and society.
Henrietta Müller, 1846-1906, journalist and speaker committed to the cause of women, founder of The Women's Penny Paper.
John Millington Synge, 1871-1909, playwright of the Irish literary renaissance, author of an influential book about the harsh life and rich folk culture of the Aran Islands.
Graham Greene, 1904-91, novelist and thriller-writer, specializing in self-destructive lives in exotic locations which are sometimes lumped together under the name of 'Greeneland'.
Margaret Laurence, 1926-87, Canadian novelist and short-story writer. Her translations of Somali poetry were the first to appear in English.
Alice Munro, b. 1931, Canadian short-story writer who has been hailed as a leading practitioner of her genre.
Carol Shields, b. 1935, US-born Canadian novelist, connoisseur of the ordinary, who also wrote poems and plays.
Judith Kazantzis, b. 1940, poet and artist, activist feminist, literary fighter against war, nuclear war, discrimination, and poverty.
J. K. Rowling, b. 1965, writer for children whose Harry Potter series has made her one of the most successful writers and one of the richest women of her generation.

Entries Enhanced

334 existing author entries were updated or enhanced. There has been the usual revision in the light of new editions, biographies, etc. Even newspaper items have offered new sidelights, like a report in which a son of Naomi Mitchison, a distinguished researcher in the field of drugs against tuberculosis, featured as the oldest professor in Britain, still at work at ninety. Though there has not been time to take fully into account Jackie Kay's memoir Red Dust Road (June 2010), it has been used through excerpts in the press. The most extraordinary updating is probably a belated one: the unnoticed death of Edith Templeton in 2006. Here are one or two highlights.

Jane Austen. In the news as ever, this time not for zombies but for the first digital edition of her literary manuscripts.
Simone de Beauvoir. The appearance of the long-awaited new translation of The Second Sex, its repudiation as wholly inadequate by Toril Moi, and the resulting critical controversy.
Agatha Christie. She too remains in the news, this time through the discovery of lost jewels which were probably her mother's.
Mary Delany. The major exhibition of her art works at Sir John Soane's Museum, London.
Elizabeth Gilding. A death-date and other details yielded by her husband's funeral sermon on her.
Jane Harvey. Information about her father courtesy of Jim Hepburn's research. More to follow.
Elizabeth Hervey. Helena Kelly, editor of her novel Ned Evans, has revealed her brief marriage as a teenager to the confusingly-named Alexander Harvie (a crony of her stepfather's) and her time as mistress of the Della Crusca poet Robert Merry, as well as a level unremarked allusion in the novel to actual personalities of the Irish nationalist movement.
Florence Nightingale. As the centenary of her death, 2010 has been designated International Year of the Nurse.
Edith Templeton. Her death in 2006, belatedly discovered by Orlando, went virtually unreported in the English-speaking press, though she had been (repeatedly since the 1950s and into her own nineties) hailed as one of the most interesting novelists writing in English.
Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan. Research by John Goss has uncovered a novel she issued anonymously in 1796, before her marriage. (She is known, if at all, for her delightful poetry.) Goss's forthcoming edition has much new information from her husband's diary.

Free-standing events

63 existing freestanding events were also updated or enhanced. Additions here run from the death on 7 March 203 AD of Perpetua, the Christian martyr who authored the earliest extant text in Latin by a woman, to the British general election of 6 May 2010 (with the coverage or non-coverage of women during the campaign) and the days of uncertainty that followed before the establishment of a coalition government. The Women's History Network Blog for March 2010 (Women's History Week) provided some interesting new events as well as nuggets to add to entries.

Summary of Content

12 entries (7 British women writers, 2 male writers, 4 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted); 74 free-standing chronology entries; 723 new bibliographical listings; 40,287 new tags; 156,913 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2011

New Author Entries

Bathsheba Bowers, 1671-1718, colonial American Quaker, who wrote a number of works that do not survive, and published a spiritual autobiography which seems to have displeased the meeting of Friends in Philadelphia.
Thomas Holcroft, 1745-1809, self-made man of labouring-class origins who became a playwright, translator, novelist, and autobiographer: a leading figure among the 1790s Radicals and a mentor of William Godwin.
Elizabeth Isabella Spence, 1768-1832, novelist and writer of travel books about England and Scotland, who takes a particular interest in local women writers.
Frances Holcroft, 1785-1844, daughter of Thomas above, and herself a poet, translator, and novelist.
Frances Isabella Duberly, 1829-1903, who accompanied her husband on service with the British army. Her letters and journals set out to capture the exclusively male military experience of Empire (including scandalous mismanagement in the Crimea), or rather to provide, unusually, a woman's perspective on it.
Mary Anne Barker, 1831-1911, journalist, children's writer, memoirist and travel writer. Her reminiscences of living on four continents as a subject of the British Empire illuminate the daily struggles of life from the point of view of marriage to an officer, a farmer, or a colonial administrator.
Anna Kingsford, 1846-86, qualified medical doctor, journalist, writer of historical fiction, and polemicist on behalf of women's suffrage, women's education, vegetarianism, and latterly of Theosophy and eclectic Christianity.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935, American novelist, poet, lecturer, artist, economist, feminist theorist, editor, and reformer, best remembered for her story The Yellow Wallpaper, her treatise Women and Economics, and her utopian fantasy Herland.
Ménie Muriel Dowie, 1866-1945, travel and adventure writer, essayist and fiction writer, whose A Girl
in the Karpathians, 1891, was a sensation, and whose New Woman novels are undeservedly forgotten.
Edith Mary Moore, 1873 - after 1935, novelist and author of a treatise on gender relations. Her novels, which engage with issues of idealism and materialism, love and suffering, masculinity and femininity, rural and urban lifestyles, were highly praised on first appearance but then sank without trace.
Jane Gardam, b. 1928, author of fiction for children, young people, and adults, who refuses to draw lines of demarcation between one kind of work and another. She has won awards for stories, novels, and children's books.

Entries Enhanced

193 existing author entries were updated or enhanced. As usual, biographies and memoirs (notably Maggie Gee's My Animal Life, Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road, and Elizabeth Jenkins's The View from Downshire Hill, 2004) have provided opportunities for rich additions. So have direct communications from generous friends, reporting both their own research and other information of interest. The death of Beryl Bainbridge precipitated additions beyond those from obituaries. The publication online of William Godwin's diary, sparse as that is in detail, has also provided some additions. Sources like the TLS Digital Archive and the Reading Experience Database, which Orlando has never searched in their voluminous entirety, continue to yield valuable nuggets. Just a few specifics below:

Jane Austen has been, unsurprisingly, in the news again, for material ranging from Marvel comic-book versions of her works to huge prices for sales of first editions, including what was originally the governess Anne Sharp's copy of Emma for £325,000.
Mary Collyer: more on her children from her collateral descendant Geoff Culshaw; more on her ground-breaking children's book from Andrea Immel.
Mary Delany: when much of her life-writing was published in mid-nineteenth century, Harriet Martineau thought it "perhaps the greatest in the book way for these seven years." She had nothing good to say about the editor, Lady Llanover (under whose name this reference is concealed in the invaluable Reading Experience Database).
Carol Shields: an interesting allusion to Unless in Margaret Forster's Over.
Virginia Woolf: Sarah Ruhl's New York Production of Orlando on stage.

Free-standing events

54 new freestanding events. Among much that is new and some of it recent, material has been added on the adoption of Gallup polls, the publications of Mary Daly, and the newly-discovered poem by Ted Hughes about the death of Sylvia Plath.

Summary of Content

11 entries (9 British women writers, 1 male writer, 2 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted); 54 free-standing chronology entries; 270 new bibliographical listings; 27,957 new tags; 944,773 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2011

New Author Entries

Elizabeth Bathurst, 1655-91, colonial American Quaker, who wrote a number of works that do not survive, and published a spiritual autobiography which seems to have displeased the meeting of Friends in Philadelphia.
Jane Johnson, 1706-59, letter-writer, poet, author of little teaching books for her children and of the earliest identified original fairy-story in English.
Elizabeth Smith, 1776-1826, linguist and translator. She showed some precocious literary talent, but her outstanding abilities (denied any serious scope by her gender coupled with her family's gentry status and lack of money) lay primarily in the direction of scholarship.
Katherine Cecil Thurston, 1875-1911, popular novelist who achieved fame and fortune with John Chilcote, MP (The Masquerader in the USA), 1904, and whose The Fly on the Wheel, 1908, curiously parallels some of the mysterious circumstances of her own death.
Constance Smedley, 1876-1941, journalist, playwright, novelist, and tireless activist. She took up (and wrote a fiery polemic for) the suffrage cause, then that of the English rural poor, whom she set out to educate politically through massive popular pageants. With her husband she exercised the experimental performance arts in Gloucestershire, London, and across the USA.
Ethel Wilson, 1888-1980. Canadian short-story writer and novelist (born in South Africa and educated partly in England) who actively opposed the concept of 'Canadian literature', while contributing importantly to it. A pioneer of regional fiction in Canada.
Elizabeth Jenkins, 1905-2010, novelist, writer of historical biographies (including one on Jane Austen, two on Queen Elizabeth I, and several group biographies of famous or notorious women), and a sparkling memoirist when in her nineties.
Philip Larkin, 1922-85, a leading twentieth-century poet despite his slender output.
Andrea Levy, born 1956, Black British novelist whose fiction has broadened out from modern, ostensibly multicultural London, via the bigoted city where her parents landed from Jamaica in 1946, to the epic territory of early nineteenth-century Jamaica, with slavery in its last stages.
Sarah Waters, born 1966, writer of historical fiction whose debut novel, Tipping the Velvet, made headlines by its outspoken presentation of Victorian-age lesbian lifestyles.

Entries Enhanced

As usual, a number of women writers have been the subject of events or ceremonies which have ranked a mention in their entries: for instance, Aphra Behn (for the appearance of the journal Aphra Behn Online, which covers other writers from the long eighteenth century as well), Wendy Cope (not only for one of the many new books mentioned in this update, but for the British Library's purchase of her electronic archive, a hard-drive containing her correspondence), Nawal El Saadawi (for participation and also comment on recent events in Egypt), Elizabeth Montagu, and Marie Stopes. Others have published new titles (including Beryl Bainbridge's posthumous The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress) or had significant new titles published about them.

Penelope Aubin. New information from the continuing research of Debbie Welham, Chris Mounsey, and others.
W. H. Auden. Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University has a database which sets out the evidence for Auden's being related by blood or marriage to an astonishing number of women writers going back to Marguerite of Navarre and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.
Anna Brassey. Interesting details about the publication of A Voyage of the Sunbeam, from Asa Briggs's history of Longman's publishing house.
Sarah Butler. Here, sad to say, new scholarship leaves us with less information instead of more. The new edition of Butler's Irish Tales, 1716, by Ian Campbell Ross, Aileen Douglas and Anne Markey, erases
several details of her life and even casts doubt on her existence.
Eliza Fenwick. Knowledge about her continues to expand. Lissa Paul, in The Children's Book Business, 2011, and in research unpublished but generously shared, has led to Orlando additions about Fenwick and several of her contemporaries.
Sarah Fielding. Her three hundredth anniversary came and went without challenge to the often-stated belief that her Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, 1747, was only the second novel that a woman published in English by subscription. (The first was The Reform'd Coquet, 1724, by Mary Davys, who went on to issue her Works by subscription.) By chance a chronological
search of Orlando revealed that Elizabeth Boyd has a better claim than Fielding to second place: she published The Happy-Unfortunate by subscription in 1732. The Sarah Fielding entry has been rephrased.
Pam Gems. Some updating followed her death on 13 May 2011.
James Joyce. Orlando could not resist adding the story of how scientists wanted to include in the "first synthetic life form" (a bacterium with computer-composed DNA) the words from Portrait of the Artist about recreating life out of life. The entry now records how the Joyce estate put paid to this.
Fanny Kemble. Information about the extraordinary photos taken in 1915 by Amelia M. Watson for a projected, but never published, illustrated edition of Kemble's slave-plantation journal (from the research of Laura Engel).
Liz Lochhead has been appointed national poet of Scotland: her title is not Laureate but Makar (that is, in the Scots language maker, that is creator, that is poet). This glorious and suggestive title prodded us to change the former situation whereby a free-text search in Orlando on the word "makar" used to turn up just one result: Priscilla Bawcutt's Dunbar the Makar (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). Now the free-text function, primed on this detail of the Scots language, allows a free-text search on "maker" to find Orlando's mentions both of William Dunbar's well-known poem beginning "I that in heill wes and gladness", written about 1505 and later known as "The Lament for the Makaris", and of Anne Stevenson's tribute series entitled A Lament for the Makers, June 2006.
Mary Shelley has continued to be the cause of creativity in other writers, this time through Nick Dear's hard-hitting new stage adaptation entitled Frankenstein.

Free-standing events

72 new free-standing events run from the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland in April 1014 to the defection of Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church in April 2011 because they refuse to accept women as bishops.

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers, 1 male writer, 1 other woman writer; 72 new free-standing chronology entries; 358 new bibliographical listings; 30,714 new tags; 7,756,844 total words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2012

New Author Entries

Lady Lucy Herbert, 1668 or 1669 - 1744, Roman Catholic prioress and devotional writer, sister of Lady Nithsdale following.
Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale, 1672-1749, letter-writer, remembered for her account of her daring rescue of her condemned Jacobite husband from the Tower of London, sister of Lady Lucy Herbert above.
Ellis Cornelia Knight, 1757-1837, novelist, poet, diarist and autobiographer, remembered for her sequel to Samuel Johnson's Rasselas and her equally unusual historical novel set during the Roman Empire.
Selina Davenport, 1779-1859, novelist who wrote (after ending an unhappy marriage) to secure a bare subsistence for herself and her daughters. Her novels have great energy and preposterous plots. Her ex-husband tried to prevent the Royal Literary Fund from helping her.
Isabella Neil Harwood, 1837-88, novelist and playwright whose life is obscure. Her sensation novels (dealing in inheritance, mistaken identity and so on) and her plays (many of them in verse and based on pre-existing literary or historical material, written more for the library than the theatre) were both highly praised in their day.
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, 1863-1911, Irish journalist, social reformer, fiction-writer, remembered for her outspoken account of the obstacles faced by a woman attempting to gain a foothold as a London journalist.
Naomi Jacob, 1884-1964, popular dramatist, novelist, and memoirist, lesbian and cross-dresser. Her life, an odd mixture of the flamboyant and the hidden, is of more compelling interest than her writings, which are fluent, sentimental, lacking in depth — and still being reprinted. Her saga of a Jewish business family is the best known.
Evelyn Waugh, 1903-66, novelist and stylist whose mordant satire was daring in the 1920s and in his war novels, often reactionary and querulous in later life. His political values have made it easy to underestimate his art. His fictionalizing of his own bout of temporary dementia is both unusual and courageous.
Mary Stewart, born 1916, popular writer of romantic suspense novels whose English protagonists typically have to deal with crime and deception in foreign holiday spots. Natural description is important in these books. Her five historical Arthurian novels are darker and more violent.
Zadie Smith, born 1975, who attained international fame with her first novel, White Teeth, 2000. Her ambitious fictions, both long and short, are highly literary, yet steeped in the multiracial, multicultural,
urban street culture of their times.

Entries Enhanced

As usual Orlando has added things previously missed, like the fact that Daphne Du Maurier's sister Angela was also a novelist, or that Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, was personally responsible for the creation of Albert Gate, Hyde Park, or that Emily Faithfull has appeared as a central character in a fairly recent novel by Emma Donoghue. Also new publications of many kinds, and new or newly voiced opinions, have supplied material for additional information or additional comment: for instance, the first volume of Romantic Women Writers Reviewed provides a list of the twenty-four most-reviewed women of 1789-90. Most of these minor adjustments do not need to be mentioned here, but just a few are singled out below.

Margaret Atwood (a regular in these updates). Not only a new book (In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination) but a new piece of science to go with the fiction: printing on paper derived from straw, as a gesture towards a future in which no forests need die to produce even non-digital books.
Jane Austen (another regular who this time has outdone herself). Firstly, the sale of (the larger part of) the manuscript of her unfinished The Watsons in July 2011 to the Bodleian Library for 993,250 GBP (a tenfold increase in market value since the same ms sold for 90,000 GBP in 1988). Secondly, the infamous disparagement of her by V. S. Naipaul (the month before The Watsons manuscript was sold) for sentimentality. (He also asserted the inferiority to himself of women writers in general.) Thirdly, the emergence at last of a perhaps authentic portrait, brought before the public by biographer
Paula Byrne. Fouthly, see below under P. D. James.
Maria Callcott. A family archive (including first editions, portraits, a portfolio of sketches, and memorabilia) has been donated by the Graham family (descendants of her first husband) to Chawton House Library.
Sarah Butler. Here, sad to say, new scholarship leaves us with less information instead of more. The new edition of Butler's Irish Tales, 1716, by Ian Campbell Ross, Aileen Douglas and Anne Markey, erases several details of her life and even casts doubt on her existence.
Richmal Crompton. When Alan Bennett fondly recalled the part played by the William books in his childhood reading he added himself to a roster of fans that includes John Lennon and Michael Palin.
Julia Frankau. New information courtesy of her great-great-grandson Reuben Frankau.
Radclyffe Hall. Orlando had hitherto missed the continued popularity of her sentimental song about a wounded ex-soldier, "The Blind Ploughman" (eight different versions currently available on YouTube).
Cicely Hamilton. Something else Orlando had missed was her jokey little 15-page illustrated verse pamphlet "Beware! A Warning to Suffragists", 1909 (not in the British Library, Bodleian, or other UK research libraries). We were alerted to its appearance both as Object of the Month on the website of the Working Class Movement Library and (in a reprint of 1982) as an item for sale. The reprint was made from a copy "rescued from a rubbish bin in the Labour Party Library in the 1970s"- such is the fragility of women's history.
P. D. James. Having reached ninety, she felt it was now or never for combining her love of crime fiction with her love of Jane Austen: the result is Death Comes to Pemberley.
Edith Mary Moore. More and better information about this obscure and undervalued author by the generosity of her great-granddaughter Sarah Elizabeth Moore.
E. Nesbit. Colin Burrow, writing about H. G. Wells's An Experiment in Autobiography and therefore on several writers who had affairs with Wells, observed that Nesbit's novels are "easy to patronise but
belong among the greats of Edwardian fiction."
Anna Maria and Jane Porter. Updating of the entry on Jane Porter has followed from the addition of a new entry on her obscure friend Selina Davenport, while Marie Nedregotten Sørbø (as well as offering a Norwegian perspective on Anna Maria's The Recluse of Norway) has suggested on the basis of character names that one of the sisters also wrote the play Wilhelmina, 1826.
Lady Margaret Sackville. Serendipity turned up the fact (far from hidden yet unreported) that her poetry, presumably her trenchant and disturbing war poetry, was well known to Wilfred Owen, who was introduced to her by Siegfried Sassoon.
Mary Shelley. An astronomer from Texas has established, from the phases of the moon and the exact position of her bedroom in Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, the time and date of the waking dream in which she first "saw" the two central characters in Frankenstein. This vision came to her at 2 a.m. on the sleepless, moonlit night which followed debating the "principle" of life, which in turn followed by a few days Byron's challenge to his companions to write a ghost story.
Margaret Emily Shore. Orlando is privileged by the kindness of the owner, Howard Skelton, to report on a little volume compiled by this child prodigy before she reached her teens: a collection of imaginary speeches by hypothetical future parliamentarians, written in 1832 but reaching far beyond
our own era. This is separate from the two manuscript sections of her diary which came to light just in time for inclusion in the digital edition by Barbara Timm Gates.

Free-standing events

39 new free-standing events were added to the textbase.

Summary of Content

10 entries (9 British women writers, 1 male writer); 39 new free-standing chronology entries; 418 new bibliographical listings; 29,227 new tags; 7,861,990 total words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2012

New Author Entries

Susanna Hopton, 1627-1709, theological and devotional writer whose canon is still not clearly established. She was much concerned to adapt what she saw as the best of Roman Catholic devotional practices to serve the needs of the Anglican church.
Marie-Catherine de Villedieu, 1640?-1683, French writer who launched her high-profile career as Marie-Catherine Desjardins, then took the name of the lover who refused to marry her. A generic virtuoso, she was important in the history of the novel and was the first Frenchwoman to have a play professionally produced.
Henrietta Rouviere Mosse, d. 1835, London novelist of Irish origin who began writing for pleasure and continued as the sole support of her husband, who was totally incapacitated by strokes. Her appeals to the Royal Literary Fund make painful reading.
Caroline Frances Cornwallis, 1786-1858, scholar and translator, who published in journals and in her collaborative series, Short Books on Great Subjects, in the fields of science, history, philosophy, education, social critique, and women's rights.
Rebecca Harding Davis, 1831-1910, American journalist, novelist, and short-story writer who despite her own comfortable background made herself a voice for the industrial proletariat, male as well as female.
Mary Fortune ("Waif Wander"), 1833?-?1910, Australian journalist whose tough, survivor's life is still very obscure, melodramatic chronicler in fiction of the goldfields and the Australian police.
Edna Lyall, 1857-1903, popular writer of fiction (often historical romance), as well as a play and a childhood autobiography. Her novels take up the causes of Ireland, or the Armenians, or prejudice against the Other; several hold up for admiration foreigners, or socio-political activists, or non-Christians.
Edna St Vincent Millay, 1892-1950, American poet who is remembered (and often mocked) for her passionate love poetry. Her drama, her feminism, her life-writings, and politically committed writing (especially anti-war writing) have still not received critical justice.
Harold Pinter, 1930-2008, poet and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, husband of Antonia Fraser.
Alice Walker, b. 1944, African-American writer in many genres -- poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and journalist – whose writings are famous across the world as passionate anti-racist and anti-war polemics. She is best known for her novel The Color Purple.

Entries Enhanced

There has been the usual crop of splendid new writings demanding comment, like Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat, Nadine Gordimer's No Time Like the Present, Jackie Kay's Reality, Reality, Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Toni Morrison's Home, Ruth Padel's The Mara Crossing, Michele Roberts's Ignorance, Marina Warner's Stranger Magic. There has been, alas, the death of Adrienne Rich. New (or newly used) scholarly publications have added valuable additions or revisions. So has journalism, for instance the Guardian's delightful "My Hero" series. New entries (like that on Caroline Frances Cornwallis) have resulted in new detail being added to existing entries.

Elizabeth von Arnim 's Elizabeth and Her German Garden was featured as a love-gift in the popular TV series Downton Abbey.
Jane Austen again required updating, with new material from the ongoing struggle to identify visual representations of her and from Kathryn Sutherland's research in the John Murray archive (not to mention Deirdre Le Faye's new edition of her letters and DeeDee Baldwin's clever re-writing of Pride and Prejudice as a Facebook news feed).
Margaret Atwood too has remained similarly newsworthy, publishing another speculative fiction, I'm Starving for You, not in print but solely as an e-book.
Anna Letitia Barbauld achieved further recognition with a two-day conference on her writing at Chawton House Library, which mustered an unusual level of scholarly innovation and enthusiasm.
Charlotte Bronte made news with the appearance before the public of her devoir or French homework "L''Ingratitude", a chilling little fable of filial disobedience and crushing punishment, done for her charismatic teacher M. Heger.
Carol Ann Duffy as Poet Laureate had the assignment of editing Jubilee Line: 60 Poets for 60 Years.
Eliza Fenwick had more light thrown on her life in Barbados and North America, through the continuing research of Lissa Paul.
Sarah Green: her supposed first novel, Charles Henley, or the Fugitive Restored, turns out to have a more likely claimant named Mary O'Brien, who also published a poem and a comedy, both political in tone. This is not a very fruitful discovery, since no copy of the novel is known to survive.
Fanny Aikin Kortright. The Orlando entry already noted that her anti-suffrage pamphlet Pro Aris et Focis had been wrongly attributed to Rebecca Harding Davis. The entry now pinpoints the cause: each writer had published a novel entitled Waiting for the Verdict.
Mary Robinson. The entry now takes account of various recent research publications.
J. K. Rowling retained media attention with nuggets of information about her forthcoming first adult novel and the first academic conference devoted to the Harry Potter books.
Mary Shelley (another regular on this list) has now acquired an iPhone/iPad app for Frankenstein. Admirers of the novel as she wrote it are unlikely to be pleased. Also added is John Murray's rejection of Frankenstein the year before its appearance from Lackington.
(Margaret) Emily Shore: further works by this precocious and short-lived genius continue to emerge into public consciousness.
Queen Victoria's journals in the Royal Archives have been posted on the web in their entirety to mark her successor's diamond jubilee.

Free-standing events

28 new free-standing events were added to the textbase.

Summary of Content

10 entries (5 British women writers, 5 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted—, and 1 male writer); 28 new free-standing chronology entries; 403 new bibliographical listings; 89,900 new tags; 132,567 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2013

New Author Entries

Anna Williams, 1706-83, translator, poet, and anthologist, whose ambition of compiling a dictionary of scientific terms (in which she was an expert) came to nothing, probably because she was by then totally blind.
Lady Anna Miller, 1741-81, travel writer, patron of poetry, and anthologist.
Tabitha Tenney, 1762-1837, anthologist (probably) and author of Female Quixotism, an important early-American novel.
Jane Hume Clapperton, 1832-1914, journalist, social reformer and pamphleteer.
Helen Mathers, 1853-1920, prolific popular novelist who scored an immense success with her very first novel, Comin' Thro' the Rye, published in 1875.
Lady Colin Campbell, (born Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, 1857-1911), Irish-born feminist and journalist, who survived and rose above a particularly nasty divorce scandal.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930, well known as creator of Sherlock Holmes, is less known for his work in many other genres, including a fictional vindication of women doctors.
Nina Hamnett, 1890-1956, visual artist, modernist, Bohemian, and memoir writer.
Gillian Allnutt, b. 1949, feminist poet and anthologist, re-creator of women's voices like those of Elizabeth Siddal and Sojourner Truth.
Kate Clanchy, b. 1965. Author of three volumes of poetry and a remarkable memoir of a woman refugee from Kosovo.

Entries Enhanced

These six months have seen more than their share of exciting new publications. Among new novels, Zadie Smith's NW looks at London at the current moment and J. K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy at a provincial town, also contemporary. Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate provides a whole new narrative of the often-fictionalised but all too real events involving the 'Lancashire witches' of 1612. Rose Tremain's Merivel: A Man of his Time revisits the era of her highly successful Restoration. Fay Weldon's Habits of the House looks at imperial Britain at the close of the nineteenth century, while Pat Barker's Toby's Room looks a generation onwards from that time, to a Britain trying to reclaim shattered identities after the first world war. A new play by Caryl Churchill, Love and Information, is a rare occurrence, though unsurprisingly a disturbing one; a new volume of stories by Alice Munro, Dear Life, is happily less rare. Edna O'Brien's autobiography, Country Girl, provides a brilliant and sobering account of the kind of gendered literary hostility that one might have supposed to belong to a more distant past. Other news includes the planning of a memorial to Agatha Christie in Covent Garden, London, and the award to Hilary Mantel of her second Booker Prize.

Mary Astell. Her entry and that on Anne Finch have been modified to acknowledge (as most sources on these two writers do not) that their friend Lady Catherine Jones was the grand-daughter of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, whom the ODNB calls "the leading woman intellectual of her generation." Another untraced thread in a female tradition.
Margaret Atwood is pursuing her career as a geek by launching the website Fanado, which puts artists or creators in digital touch with their fans.
Agatha Christie. A lost text has emerged: an essay on English detective writers, commissioned by the Ministry of Information for celebratory or propaganda purposes in 1945 and never published in England. (Christie freely pointed out faults as well as virtues anyway, especially in Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers.) The essay now makes the introduction to a new edition of Ask
a Policeman, 1933, a collaboration by the Detection Club (not including Christie).
Hannah Cowley. Her entry has been variously updated, most arrestingly with an earlier marriage date than the universally-listed 1772. Biographers of Cowley have missed the entry in Cheshire Parish Registers and Bishop's Transcripts (duly copied by the International Genealogical Index) which records Hannah Parkhouse's wedding to Thomas Cowley at Chester on 1 January 1771.
Sarah Fielding: the painting by Henry Singleton of a scene from David Simple is now at Chawton House Library, where it joins Singleton's two paintings of scenes from Frances Burney's Camilla.
Anne Finch: Gillian Wright's discovery of a previously unknown poem by her, "The Nightingale, and the Cuckoo".
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis: research by Gwen Davies has revealed her global reach in English translation: the reprinting of Adelaide and Theodore in The Nova-Scotia Packet and General Advertiser within a very few years of its publication.
Elizabeth Gooch: research by Paul Rice has discovered the front-page newspaper advertisement she issued for her autobiography, giving the names of more than a hundred people mentioned in the book: from royal dukes in England and France, through distinguished churchmen, army officers, and theatre people, to her husband's relations and her own seducers and lovers.
Katherine Mansfield: graduate student Chris Mourant has turned up four previously unknown stories by her (one of them dealing with a difficult passage in her own life) in the archives of King's College, London - just in time for them to appear in the new Edinburgh edition of her collected fiction.
Iris Murdoch: another discovery of an unknown cache of manuscripts. These are letters, many of them love-letters, to the philosopher Philippa Foot. The Orlando entry already recorded that they were lovers, though some of the media suggested that this had been unknown until now.
Mariana Starke: research by Elizabeth Crawford posted on Women and her Sphere has resulted in extensive re-writing. It explodes the myth that Starke grew up in India (where her father's colonial service ended before she was born) but illuminates the way her family links with India, and (through her great-grandfather) with the slave trade, chart the changing legacies of empire.
Augusta Webster: some revisions following Patricia Rigg's fine biographical study of 2009.

Free-standing events

41 free-standing events have been added on the histories of smallpox, shorthand, witch trials, the co-operative movement, the London postal districts, Google, the Women's Library, and various publications by writers who are without their own entries.

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers, 1 other women writer, and 1 male writer); 41 new free-standing chronology entries; 259 new bibliographical listings; 22,867 new tags; 80,836 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2013

New Author Entries

Lady Jane Cavendish, c. 1621-1669: as a young woman growing up in a highly performative social and cultural milieu, she was lead author on two dramatic works (one almost certainly performed) and a body of poetry.
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater, 1626-63: her juvenile part in her sister's theatrical and poetical works turns out slighter than once supposed, but she later wrote remarkable prayers and meditations, particularly about childbirth.
Sarah Murray, 1744-1811: author of pioneering guidebooks about travel in the Lake District, the Highlands, and the Hebrides, and (if correctly identified as the former Sarah Maese or Mease) of a book of pedagogy and improving fiction.
Mary, Lady Champion de Crespigny, 1748/9-1812: poet, novelist, and patron of other writers.
Mary Julia Young, before 1775 - after 1810: poet and novelist, proud of her ill-defined family relationship with the poet, playwright, and critic Edward Young.
Katherine Bruce Glasier, 1867 - 1950: feminist socialist writer and polemicist who urged, in pamphlets and novels, a new and different kind of society.
Margaret Legge, 1872-1957: obscure author of novels or unusually-angled romances, which flirt with feminist and utopian ideas and are critical of current social arrangements.
Tillie Olsen, 1913-2007: American Communist and feminist poet, novelist, short-story writer, and first and last a polemicist.
Gwen Moffat, born 1924: mountaineer, writer of memoirs (one a pioneering ecological text), travel books, a historical novel, and crime fiction including books featuring the climber and amateur sleuth Melinda Pink.
Joanna Trollope, born 1943: popular novelist who began with historical romances and turned to novels charting the complicated relationships within and around the contemporary family.

Entries Enhanced

Again this update records exciting new publications: poetry volumes entitled Ice by Gillian Clarke, Environmental Studies by Maureen Duffy, De Chirico's Threads by Carol Rumens, Unsent by Penelope Shuttle, and Astonishment by Anne Stevenson; a book about forests by Sarah Maitland; a "Barbara Vine" novel by Ruth Rendell; Last Friends, the completion of her trilogy, by Jane Gardam; and a new novel, Heartbreak Hotel, by Deborah Moggach. Again it provides fascinating incidental detail: who knew that Eric Hobsbawm and Karl Miller shared a mutual admiration for Harriette Wilson and Alice Munro? Balancing those pleasurable discoveries is the information about several writers' deaths, much regretted. Nina Bawden, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have died recently (enabling Orlando for the first time to take note of such matters as Eva Figes's controversially anti-Israeli views). Regrettable for another reason is that Orlando missed the deaths of Shelagh Delaney (2011) and Anna Livia and Maud Sulter (both 2007). We should have done better; but we also note that remarkable authors can leave the world with very little notice taken, especially if they are female.

Agatha Christie. The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of
Mystery presents unpublished letters and other memorabilia from her travels with her first husband on behalf of the Overseas Mission of the British Empire.
Shelagh Delaney. Her forgotten short sketch "Then and Now" was rediscovered (along with other 1960s sketches by Harold Pinter and others) in time to form part of The Lost Plays Revue, staged at
Nottingham Playhouse to celebrate fifty years in its present home.
Harriet Downing. Michael Londry has kindly supplied her missing death and probable birth dates.
Sophia King (later Fortnum). Another novel thought lost forever has turned out to be still extant. A so far unique copy of King's The Victim of Friendship has been hiding in the New York Society Library
(a private institution dating from 1754).
Kathleen Jamiehas issued a book of poems and a book of nature writing since Orlando
last caught up with her activity.
Hilary Mantel. The row that reverberated to the highest levels when her lecture on royal bodies (from Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII) was read as an attack on the Duchess of Cambridge.
Elizabeth Meeke. Until summer 2013 Orlando had an entry for "Mary Meeke", the usual misidentification for a prolific popular novelist who was in fact Elizabeth née Allen, the "fallen" stepsister of Frances and Sarah Harriet Burney. Mary has therefore been rewritten as Elizabeth, and both Burney entries have been updated in the light of Simon Macdonald's discovery of a family relationship which was evidently a grave embarrassment to Frances.
Elizabeth Shirley. Caroline Bowden's English Convents in Exile, 2012, provides a first complete printing of her Life of Margaret Clement (as well as excerpts of two works by Lady Lucy Herbert and some letters of Winefred Thimelby).
Githa Sowerby. This year, 2013, sees a "mini-revival" of her plays, with two productions and high praise from one of the directors, Jonathan Miller.
Sarah Stone: new information from research by Mary E. Fissell. This skilled, ambitious, and eloquent midwife seemed to vanish from history immediately after she moved her practice from Bristol to London, 1736, and published her book, 1737. It is bitter-sweet to learn that she died later that year: at least her disappearance was not the defeat of her career ambitions.
Violet Trefusis: the brochure for Tiziana Masucci's ebullient commemoration of Trefusis in Florence in April-May 2013 supplied information about her benefactions at her death to St Mark's Church in Florence and to the poor of the city.

Free-standing events

Newly-added free-standing events run from early 1136 (the death of the poet Princess Gwenllian) to early 2013 (the equalization of the sexes in the line of succession to the British throne, and the London Zoo's pairing of poets or novelists with scientists in presentations on rare breeds of animal). In between, the new events deal with leisure activities and scientific advances, women voting in local elections (1843), "the first modern globalized financial crisis" (which began in 1873), and with events in the history of the USA, China, and British law on abortion.

Summary of Content

10 entries (9 British women writers and 1 other women writer); 51 new free-standing chronology entries; 305 new bibliographical listings; 24,206 new tags; 88,620 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2014

New Author Entries

Anne Thérèse de Lambert, 1647-1733: French writer of conduct books and comment on the status of women, highly influential in England.
Mary Caesar, 1677-1741: in beautiful handwriting but atrocious spelling, she kept for more than twenty years an extraordinary journal of her own and her husband' intense involvement in the Jacobite cause, something between a political memoir and a commonplace-book.
Judith Cowper Madan, 1702-81: a poet of skill and charm, who seems never to have been comfortable with the identity of female writer. Her poems (far fewer after her marriage than before) appeared in print in miscellanies, apparently without her agency. They were collected in manuscript by one of her brothers.
Susanna Pearson, probably before 1770 – after 1817: poet (with work in magazines and two collected volumes) whose life remains almost unknown. Even the ascription to her of a single novel is not entirely certain, but both poetry and novel are full of interest.
May Kendall, 1861-1943: author of highly individual poetry, New Woman novels, fairy-tale, and social reform polemic.
Mary Frances Billington, 1862-1925: journalist whose achievements in this field were ground-breaking for a woman and who smoothed other women's way in her profession. Her books deal with Western perceptions of women's lives in India, and women's work during World War One.
Doreen Wallace, 1897-1989: one of the early university-educated women novelists, whose fiction is much concerned with the limited options for the educated woman; also a non-fiction about English regions, and a polemicist in the anti-tithe movement.
Diana Athill, publisher, fiction-writer, and author of highly-regarded, unusually frank personal and professional memoirs extending into old age.
Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013: leading Irish poet of the second part of the twentieth century, and author of perceptive literary-critical works.

Entries Enhanced

As always there are exciting new publications: Fleur Adcock's Glass Wings, Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam, Margaret Drabble's The Pure Gold Baby , Germaine Greer's White Beech, Susan Hill's Black Sheep, Elizabeth Jane Howard's All Change, Penelope Lively's Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time, Edna O'Brien's The Love Object, Ruth Rendell's No Man's Nightingale, Zadie Smith's The Embassy of Cambodia, and Fay Weldon's The New Countess, third in her Love and Inheritance series. Also non-publications like Timberlake Wertenbaker's new (and ancient) play, Our Ajax.

Also news to rejoice at: Alice Munro's being awarded the Nobel Prize for fiction. Also news to mourn: the death of Doris Lessing.
Elizabeth Jane Howard's death on 2 January 2014, unlike her final novel on 7 November 2013, came too late for this update to notice it properly.
And as usual, there are some additions that escaped earlier updates, like Louise Page's theatrical adaptation of Hugh Walpole's Rogue Herries, which played at Keswick in March-April 2013.
Jane Cave Norbert Schrer's research has supplied better birth and death dates, a previously unknown verse pamphlet, and a volume, long lost to sight, which with unique candour details her husband's frequenting of a brothel and infecting her with sexually transmitted disease.
Maureen Duffy: her eightieth birthday was splendidly celebrated at King's College, London.
Antonia Fraser: her study of the eighteen months leading up to the first Reform Bill, The Perilous Question.
Germaine Greer: her sale of her papers to the University of Melbourne.
Aemilia Lanyer. Simon Forman's diaries are now available online (in part) in the Wellcome Casebooks Project.
Amy Levy: some revisions in light of Christine Pullen's critical biography.
Olivia Manning: some details from Deirdre David's biography, 2012.
J. K. Rowling: the sensation of this update. Her publishing of a detective novel under a male pseudonym, her unmasking, and her completion of a second in what will be a series.
Naomi Royde-Smith: many interesting details added, originating when a user contacted Orlando to point out an error derived from the ODNB entry.
Mary Shelley: On Hallowe'en the first phase of the Shelley-Godwin Archive (centrepiece the ms of Frankenstein) opened to the public.

Free-standing events

New contextual events begin and end with religion: from the creation of the exquisite Kentish Vespasian Psalter in about the year 756 to the prayers offered at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on the first day of the month of Tamuz (9 June 2013) by feminist women praying in the same way that Jewish men pray.

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers, 1 other women writer and 1 male writer); 40 new free-standing chronology entries; 545 new bibliographical listings; 45,673 new tags; 88,620 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2014

New Author Entries

Rose Hickman, 1526-1613: Protestant middle-class Londoner whose memoirs of the turbulent Reformation years were preserved by her descendants as "Certaine old storyes recorded by an aged gentlewoman".
Sarah, Lady Cowper, 1644-1723: diarist, commonplace-book writer, and abridger (for a daughter-in-law) of a history of the world from biblical times to the present.
Mary, Countess Cowper, 1685-1724: like her mother-in-law a diarist, in her case of life at Court. She destroyed much of her text when anxious about possible repercussions. Odd that though she mentions her birthday in her diary no published source gives her a more precise birthdate than the year alone.
J. S. Anna Liddiard, c. 1780 - c. 1820: Irish poet, who writes like an Irish nationalist about British politics and like a British patriot about European issues.
Fanny Kingsley, 1814-91: devoted muse to her husband Charles Kingsley, who after his death compiled a biography of him and four different selections of his writings.
Isabella Ormston Ford, 1855-1922: activist in the causes of socialism and feminism (which she saw as indissolubly linked) and pacifism. She published novels and short stories as well as informative, polemical journalism and pamphlets.
Kate Parry Frye, 1878-1959: suffragist, playwright, and recently rediscovered diarist.
Muriel Jaeger, 1892-1969: one of the least known but not least interesting of the Somerville College novelists. Her novels present innovative and controversial ideas in the guise of science-fiction; her plays and non-fiction (biography, politics, psychology) are equally thought-provoking.
Anne Sexton, 1928-74: American poet whose often anguished personal writing, vividly imagistic, explores the psychic damage often inflicted on women by the gendered power-relations of the mid twentieth century.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, born 1942: Irish poet, translator, scholar and critic, co-founder and co-editor of the journal Cyphers.

Entries Enhanced

Living writers have as usual provoked a good deal of revision to the textbase. They have contributed to the press (just a few of these are Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson). They have published new books as disparate as Elaine Feinstein's It Goes with the Territory, Jane Gardam's The Stories, Kathleen Jamie's Frissure, Judith Kazantzis', Sister Invention, and Sara Maitland's Moss Witch. Atwood (again!) has had an opera produced, based on the amazing E. Pauline Johnson. Others (like Hilary Mantel) have publications heralded though not yet out. Even the non-living have new publications: Samuel Beckett, Echo's Bones, written 1933, was first published in 2014.

Anne Askew: David Harsent's "Fire: a song for Mistress Askew" demonstrates her continuing power to inspire.
Jane Austen: word of new endorsements for the Rice portrait, and less appealingly of Hyde Park's fibreglass statue of Colin Firth as Darcy groin-deep in water, and Nicholas Ennos's book purporting to prove that Eliza de Feuillide wrote the novels.
Beryl Bainbridge: a chance to see her visual art in a small exhibition at King's College, London.
Margaret Cavendish: Siri Hustvedt paid her the silent compliment of borrowing a Cavendish title for her new novel (about a woman artist of outlandish appearance, whose husband's surname is Lord) The Blazing World. Few noticed the title.
Kate Clanchy: belated notice of her story "The Not-Dead and the Saved", 2009.
Elaine Feinstein: details added (and on other writers too) from her memoir It Goes with the Territory, 2013.
Caroline Herschel: an exhibition devoted to her (rather than to her brother or nephew) at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath.
Ruth Padel: her "Seven Words and an Earthquake" (new words for Haydn's quartet Opus 51, a meditation on Christ's "Seven Last Words" from the cross) had its first performance in March 2014.
Ruth Rendell: added, courtesy of Deborah Kennedy's Poetic Sisters, Rendell's remarkable allusion to Anne Finch's "Trail All Your Pikes" (written around three hundred years before) in The Monster in the Box, 2009.
Mary Shelley: her inscribed copy of Frankenstein given to Byron turned up among the papers of the
late Douglas Jay, politician, and was bought by a private collector for more than £350,000.
Stevie Smith: the revival at Chichester Festival of Hugh Whitemore's excellent play about her and her poetry.
Jane Taylor: from Michael Rosen, information about the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".
Violet Trefusis: changes made in the light of the official website posted by Tiziana Masucci.
Lady Mary Wroth: the staged reading by the Globe Theatre company of her Love's Victory at Penshurst in June 2014.

Free-standing events

Newly added free-standing events cover publications by male writers, the lifetimes of little magazines, and of course the selection of the year 2014 by Joanna Walsh and others as a year for redressing an intellectual deficit by reading female writers exclusively. These "new" events run from Thomas Aquinas to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Britain.

Enhanced background material includes expanded information on the history of philanthropy and of publishing regulations..

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers and 2 other women writers); 28 new free-standing chronology entries; 251 new bibliographical listings; 77,167 new tags; 19,924 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2015

New Author Entries

Elizabeth Grymeston, before 1563 - 1601/4. Her single surviving text, published soon after her death, is a literary-historical landmark whether read as conduct literature, essays, or a mother's legacy.
Olaudah Equiano, c. 1745 - 1797. Afro-British sailor, explorer, and autobiographer. His memoirs are the most important among his various abolitionist writings.
Anna Maria Mackenzie, by 1760 - after 1816. Author of fifteen novels and a biblical paraphrase: anonymous, pseudonymous, and under three successive married names.
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins, 1763 - 1828. Published novelist and poet, whose translations and periodical contributions remain unidentified.
Catherine Sinclair, 1800 - 1864. Scottish writer of Evangelical, didactic fiction and non-fiction, some of it addressed to the young, and of travel books about Britain.
Charlotte Guest, 1812 - 1895. English enthusiast for medieval Welsh romance: translator of the Mabinogion. She was a lifelong diarist, and also published on the iron business and on her collection of porcelain.
Kate Greenaway, 1846 - 1901. Though remembered almost exclusively as an illustrator, she longed to be a writer, and published her own verses for children in Under the Window, 1879, and other volumes.
Maud Gonne, ?1866 - 1953. English-born activist in the cause of Irish independence. Her polemical writings culminated in her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, 1938. The queen here is Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
Kathleen Nott, 1905 - 1999. Novelist, poet, and philosophical and critical writer, who sought to counter the infiltration of literary by religious criteria in the criticism of T. S. Eliot and others.
Maya Angelou, 1928 - 2014. Afro-American poet, dramatist, and autobiographer.

Entries Enhanced

There are the usual exciting new publications: Gillian Allnutt, indwelling; Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress; Eavan Boland, A Woman without a Country; Wendy Cope, Life, Love and The Archers; Carol Ann Duffy, Ritual Lighting, plus her anthology 2014: Poetry Remembers, plus ""September 2014"", a poem on the love and pain between Scotland and England; Helen Dunmore, The Lie; Margaret Forster, My Life in Houses; Maggie Gee, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan; Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love (translated from Thérèse mon amour, 2008); Andrea Levy, Six Stories and an Essay; Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher; Alice Munro, Family Furnishings; Ruth Padel, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth; Sheenagh Pugh, Short Days, Long Shadows; Adrienne Rich, Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012 (her final, posthumous volume, her own selection from her life's work in verse); J. K. Rowling, The Silkworm; Rose Tremain, The American Lover; Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time; Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests. Besides these, mention of much new scholarly work has been added to entries.

Deaths to record and mourn: Nadine Gordimer, P. D. James, and Mary Stewart.

Margaret Atwood: not only her new volume of tales but also her signing up as the first of a hundred writers, the majority not yet born, to be commissioned one per year to write for the Future Library, not to be read for a hundred years.
Aphra Behn: Orlando held back on reporting Leah Orr's questioning whether Behn truly wrote the well-known Love-Letters from a Nobleman to His Sister. Now the Scriblerian has called this article important (though not conclusive) the entry has been modified accordingly.
Vera Brittain: Phoenix brought out a new edition of Testament of Youth to mark the centenary of the Great War.
Dorothea Primrose Campbell: from Charlotte Walker's research, the promised evidence that while living in her native Shetland she participated in a magazine network based on London, and published both poems and fiction in the Ladies' [or Lady's] Monthly Museum.
Agatha Christie: Added: advance notice of a stage adaptation of The Secret Adversary to mark her 125th birthday in 2015. Emended: the date in Orlando's statement that The Mousetrap is still running, the
world's longest-lived theatre production. Memo: change this every year!.
Kate Clanchy: two anthologies of schoolchildren's writing under the auspices of the impressive charity First Story.
Anne Damer: the exhibition of her works in sculpture held at Strawberry Hill from August to November 2014.
Kate Parry Frye: entry expanded in the light of Elizabeth Crawford's e-biography. This supplies, for instance, information about Frye's unperformed plays, and illuminates a whole new aspect of her diary: her unflinching chronicle of old age.
Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead: among twenty contributors to Dear Scotland, which was first a performance piece, then a book: state-of-the-nation monologues composed each in the voice of a sitter depicted at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Doris Lessing: Jenny Diski's reminiscences of having been virtually adopted by Lessing as an unhappy and unruly teenager.
Naomi Mitchison: another reprint worth mentioning is Princeton's edition of The Fourth Pig, with an introduction by Marina Warner.
J. K. Rowling: not only a new detective story, but the entrenchment of the Hogwarts game of quidditch on actual, nonfictional US campuses (played, however, at ground level).

Free-standing events

The Scottish referendum of 18 September 2014 demanded not only an event in the chronological record but additions to individual entries, like those on Kathleen Jamie and Carol Ann Duffy. Rather more recent or topical events have been added than usual: not only the Scottish vote but the Anglican Church's vote to permit women bishops, the Girl Power Summit in London against female genital mutilation, the displacement of men by women on the walls of an Oxford dining hall, and the European Space Agency's landing on a comet. Less-recent material has been added on the histories of censorship, contraception, and various aspects of the long-running struggle for gender equality.

As usual, a good deal of existing chronological material has been enhanced: this time information has been expanded on matters ranging from the Eiffel Tower through British railway history to Russian space dogs.

Summary of Content

10 entries (9 British women writers and 1 other women writer); 25 new free-standing chronology entries; 251 new bibliographical listings; 8,449 new tags; 25,965 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2015

New Author Entries

Lady Hester Pulter, 1605 - 1678: major poet who has remained unknown until fairly recently because she seems not to have circulated her work, even in manuscript.
Margaret Calderwood, 1715 - 1774: Scotswoman whose journal of travelling to Continental Europe includes trenchant observations about England. She also wrote an unpublished novel and a manual about estate management.
Sarah, Lady Pennington, c. 1720 - 83: rejected by her husband after years of marriage and at least seven children, she performed the remarkable feat of writing a best-selling conduct book about exemplary behaviour.
Maria Susanna Cooper, 1737-1807: published novelist and poet, whose works for children (also printed) are lost. Didactic and conservative in fiction, she was said by her grandson to have been too submissive as a wife.
Isabella Hamilton Robinson, 1813 - 1887: diarist who wrote freely of her unsatisfying marriage and in breathless terms of erotic encounters with other men. Divorce court arguments remained inconclusive as to whether the diary was fact or fantasy.
Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910: American woman of letters, popular lecturer (on the status of women among other topics), and author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic".
Charlotte Eliza Humphry, 1851 - 1925: journalist credited with inventing the chatty women's gossip column. She published a highly successful series of advice books, on household management and society etiquette.
Anna Akhmatova, 1889 - 1966: major Russian poet and translator whose chequered career was marked at several stages by state persecution.
Gillian Slovo, born 1952: South-African-born novelist, memoirist, and playwright. Even her early thrillers deal in political machination and oppression: she has written both fact and fiction about South Africa's racial conflict and rapprochement, and broken new ground in docu-drama.
Malorie Blackman, born 1962: Black British writer for children and young people, whose teen fiction makes page-turning stories out of such serious issues as organ transplant, race hatred, and terrorism.

Entries Enhanced

There are the usual exciting new publications: Virago's new edition of Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper and the appearance of Mary Kingsley and others in Penguin's Little Black Classics series, as well as new writing like Antonia Fraser's My History; Toni Morrison's God Help the Child; Dervla Murphy's Between River and Sea. Encounters in Israel and Palestine; J. K. Rowling's brilliant Very Good Lives (her Harvard commencement speech of 2008); and Marina Warner's scintillatingly angry analyses of the situation in British universities. We also had advance notice of new books soon to come from two splendid elders: Diana Athill and Edna O'Brien.

Again, a sad loss to report. Ruth Rendell died on 2 May (but there is still another book, Dark Corners, to wait for: due in October).

Anna Atkins: had her birthday honoured with a Google Doodle.
Joan Aiken: a stage adaptation of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase opened at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury.
Lady Charlotte Bury: revision in light of Edward Copeland's The Silver Fork Novel; note that her novel The Divorced, 1837, which professes to quote Pope on its title-page, is actually quoting Matthew Prior.
A revival of Caryl Churchill's play about popular resistance, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, was timed to coincide with the British general election.
Gillian Clarke contributed to the Observer's pre-election survey "Britain Uncovered".
Anne Damer's posthumous Journal of the Heart, 1830, reclaimed for her on evidence presented in Edward Copeland's The Silver Fork Novel, though library catalogues, ignoring what is clearly stated in the preface, wrongly assign it to Damer's cousin Lady Charlotte Bury.
Anne Katharine Elwood: Kirstyn Leuner's paper at Digital Diversity 2015 let us know about the extraordinary 4-volume extra-illustrated set of her Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, 1843, which is now at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Anne Finch. Mention of the Anne Finch Digital Archive.
Bryony Lavery: her gender-bending adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island played at the National Theatre at Christmas 2014, and she took part in debate on verbatim theatre and its effects — an issue relevant to Orlando's new Gillian Slovo entry.
Doris Lessing: her 1959 play Each His Own Wilderness was revived at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Surrey.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Jacqui Grainger's welcome plan to digitize and make available her commonplace-book. And some details added on her two poems about an alleged attempted rape.
Arbella Stuart. Hardwick Hall is commemorating her in this four-hundredth centenary of her death.
Mary Tighe: her beautifully illustrated "Verses Transcribed for H. T.", now edited online by Harriet Kramer Linkin, enlarge our sense of her poetic achievement; the introduction helps to explain why she was, she said, "a great coward as to publication".
Joanna Trollope generously donated her literary manuscripts to the Bodleian Library.

Free-standing events

Even more than usual have been added. All the names suggested by Orlando's Facebook friends for entries have been covered in at least one free-standing event — apart from those who, like Malorie Blackman and Gillian Slovo, have now acquired an entry. Other new events supply more on the nineteenth-century drive for scientific education, on transgender issues, the US movement for woman suffrage, the history of humanities computing, the East India Company, and the history of South Africa.

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers and 2 other women writers); 44 new free-standing chronology entries; 272 new bibliographical listings; 62,903 new tags; 155,113 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2016

New Author Entries

Mary Mollineux, 1651?-1696: A north-country Quaker who directed her poetry to literary as well as religious ends.
Alison Cockburn, 1713-1794: She has a place in the story of the Scottish ballad revival, and wrote other occasional poems, letters, and memoirs.
Ann Thicknesse, 1737-1824: wife of a writer notorious for quarrels and shady dealing. Her first and last books (a letter to the peer who wanted her as his mistress, and a retrospective novel) deal with a scandal of her early life. She also published music manuals and a biographical dictionary of French women writers.
Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach, 1750-1828: aristocratic poet, amateur dramatist who set up private theatres in Newbury, London, and Ansbach (Bavaria), European travel writer, autobiographer, and subject of scandal.
Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre, 1768-1854: another poet, amateur dramatist (more tragedy than comedy), writer of literary and domestic letters, and editor of novels by her daughter.
Catherine Marsh, 1818-1912: writer of Evangelical and religious uplift designed to save the souls of working men and especially soldiers of the British Empire, also of a biography of her clergyman father and works on the royal family.
Sarah Macnaughtan, 1864-1916: novelist with an interesting approach to gender issues; now remembered, if at all, for her harrowing account, based on her diary, of nursing in the first world war.
Olive Senior, born 1941: poet, fiction-writer, and children's writer of the Jamaican diaspora.
Anne Carson, born 1950: Canadian scholar, poet, and fiction-writer, whose writings make a point of straddling several genres: prose-poems and novels in verse. She loves to recast classical myth, and her translations of Greek tragedy have been acclaimed on stage in London and the USA.
Candia McWilliam, born 1955: novelist, short-story writer, and author of remarkable accounts of her struggles with alcoholism and with the condition of blepharospasm, which produces blindness.

Entries Enhanced

Again a wealth of new titles: Alive, Alive Oh! by Diana Athill; The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood; Noonday by Pat Barker; The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien; a treasure-trove of letters by Iris Murdoch; Under the Rose by Julia O'Faolain (electronic edition only as yet); the posthumous Dark Corners by Ruth Rendell; Career of Evil by J. K. Rowling (not to mention Philip W. Errington's Rowling bibliography); Jefferson's Garden by Timberlake Wertenbaker; The Gap of Time. The Winter's Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson — besides collected volumes of T. S. Eliot's poems and Stevie Smith's poems and drawings, and a selected volume of Shena Mackay's stories.

Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Catherine Fanshawe, Catherine Gore, Fanny Kemble, and Mary Tighe have all had their entries enhanced as a result of work for the new entry on Barbarina Brand, Lady Dacre. Networking, long may it flourish!

Caroline Bowles: the discovery of "Mrs Southey's Narrative" about her courtship and marriage has been noted, among Anna Eliza Bray's papers at West Sussex Records Office.
Anna Eliza Bray: new material from the research of Holly Wright, who catalogued Bray's archive at West Sussex Record Office; something on Mary Maria Colling too.
On Ada Byron Day 2015 (13 October) an exhibition about her opened at the Science Museum, South Kensington, London.
Nancy Cunard: the sale of letters to her from her black lover, Henry Crowder.
Mary Delany Orlando has now taken note of the speculative but intriguing possibility put forward by Karen O'Brien and others that she may have been the unidentified 'Sophia' who in 1739-40 published Woman not Inferior to Man and Woman's Superior Excellence over Man.
Maria Edgeworth: not only the publication by the Juvenilia Press of her early play The Double Disguise, but its first performance (since the Edgeworth family acted it at Christmas 1786), given by students at the University of New South Wales.
Phebe Gibbes: thanks to research by David Hopkinson, she now has a life-story: marriage, husband, bankrupt father-in-law, a son who died young in India, and a daughter who came to condemn, on religious grounds, all literature except the devotional.
Two more novels by Eliza Haywood share a scholarly edition by Tiffany Potter: The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity, and The Surprize, or Constancy Rewarded.
The recently released film of Patricia Highsmith's lesbian novel Carol (originally published as The Price of Salt) has reaped full houses and gratifying reviews on both sides of the Atlantic; The Blunderer has been re-issued in Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.
Peter Ackroyd's new novel features Mary Lamb: who in this fiction falls in love with the Shakespeare forger William Henry Ireland.
The news emerged of MI5's twenty years of spying on Doris Lessing: "an attractive, forceful, dangerous, woman, ruthless if need be". Jenny Diski's series of memoir-essays, too, have continued to add new material to the Lessing entry.
Ethel Smyth: the production of her opera The Wreckers at Annandale-on-Hudson in summer 2015 and additional information about her Three Songs, 1913.
Astronomer Jane Squire has been given an entry in the ODNB which provides lots of new information. She was a Yorkshirewoman who invested in maritime ventures (and energetically protected her interests in court) in other contexts besides her longitude scheme.
Sarah Waters a stage adaptation of Tipping the Velvet opened in London, adapted by Kate Wade.

Free-standing events

New material covers such disparate topics as publications by sixteenth- century European women, the history of the Nazi concentration camps, the lifespan of additional nineteenth-century periodicals, and the severest London fogs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers and 2 other women writer); 28 new free-standing chronology entries; 296 new bibliographical listings; 22,969 new tags; 91,351 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2016

New Author Entries

Anne Francis, 1738-1800: scholar and poet. Her work engages with the Bible and with classical and modern European texts, theories of translation, and late in life with reformist politics, which she opposed.
Dorothea Celesia, 1738-1790: poet and playwright. From Genoa, where she lived with her Genoese husband, she persuaded David Garrick to put on her tragedy based on Voltaire, and after its success she published a long poem.
Frances Arabella Rowden, 1774-1840. A professional school-teacher in London, then in Paris, she educated a startling number of women writers from Mary Russell Mitford through Lady Caroline Lamb to Fanny Kemble. Her four books are mostly pedagogical, teaching botany, mythology, and literary history.
Catherine Maria Grey, 1798-1870, highly popular and successful novelist in didactic and silver-fork modes, whose works have in the past been almost inextricably confused with those of Maria Grey, James Malcolm Rymer (below), and the non-existent "Elizabeth Caroline Grey."
Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre, 1768-1854: another poet, amateur dramatist (more tragedy than comedy), writer of literary and domestic letters, and editor of novels by her daughter.
Mary Carpenter, 1807-77, devoted campaigner for improving the lives of the poor, who published prolifically in support of her philanthropy: of ragged schools, feeding schools, reformatory schools, prison reform, and women's education in India.
James Malcolm Rymer, 1814-84, author of penny dreadfuls, true-crime novels, and gothic horror, whose oeuvre has only recently been disentangled from those of Catherine Maria Grey (above), Maria Grey, and the invented "Elizabeth Caroline Grey."
Hannah Lynch, 1859-1904, Irish journalist, novelist, editor, translator, travel-writer, and mediator between French and English cultures. She is remembered for her controversial novel-or-memoir Autobiography of a Child (book publication 1899) and for keeping the Land League's paper, United Ireland, alive after its suppression by taking the type to Paris.
Pearl S. Buck, 1892-1973: American bestselling writer raised in China, who as a child thought herself Chinese. She was the first to write in any language of the courage and endurance of dirt-poor Chinese peasants. For only her second book (out of almost two hundred) she won the Nobel prize (first US woman to do so). Her books support progressive causes, and for years she was deemed suspect in the USA as a Communist, while banned in Communist China for showing the country in an unflattering light.
Teresa Deevy, 1894-1963: Irish playwright. Though handicapped by profound deafness, she had a play at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1930, and a great hit there (her fifth play), 1936. Then plays were turned down in 1939 and 1942, apparently because of her interest in cramped and rural-Irish, female lives. The rest of her career was in radio drama.
Sue Townsend, 1946-2014, working-class comic writer: playwright, dramatist, social critic. She became a household name with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, 1982, and its sequels.

With this update Orlando mourns novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, and novelist, biographer, and historian Margaret Forster, who have both died since our last update. Like Ruth Rendell, Forster left a completed title, How to Measure a Cow, which emerged just a month after her death.

Entries Enhanced

Scrumptious new books to report. Many paid homage to Shakespeare this April, including Malorie Blackman in a most unusual young-adult story, Carol Ann Duffy in a masque, and Duffy, Wendy Cope, and many others in poetry. Maureen Duffy has published Pictures for an Exhibition, Helen DunmoreExposure, and Rose TremainThe Gustave Sonata. Gillian Slovo published a novel, Ten Days, and had a new verbatim play produced: Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State. The 15-volume edition of Françoise de Graffigny's letters edited by English Showalter is complete. Pauline Johnson was splendidly represented in Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's Writings on Native North America, edited by Margery Fee and Dory Nason, 2015, and Janis Dawson edited for Broadview Press L. T. Meade's The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories, 2016.

The entry on Medora Gordon Byron, that dubiously-named novelist, has been rewritten (perhaps not for the last time) in the light of Andrew Ashfield's suggestion that 'Miss Byron' must have stood for Julia Maria Byron. Elizabeth Beverley (who, we now know, died of destitution in the workhouse), Harriet Downing (both of whose husbands, we now know, went bankrupt) and a number of other entries have benefited, too, from his trawling through wills and registers. Orlando is grateful.

Lissa Paul has newly identified Eliza Fenwick as responsible for another anonymous work for children: Songs for the Nursery, 1805. This first brought the world the haunting quatrain 'Arthur O'Bower', which was recognized sixty-five years ago as by Dorothy Wordsworth, but still appears all over the internet as anonymous and traditional.

Lucy Hutton. The Bodleian's purchase of her Six Sermonicles with her husband's inscription led to discovery of further information about this hitherto obscure proto-feminist in his writings and his ODNB entry.

Pamela Hansford Johnson. Orlando has noted disagreement about her status between Wendy Pollard (biographer) and Tessa Hadley (reviewer).

Patricia Highsmith has been fictionalized in Jill Dawson's The Crime Writer.

Sarah Kane. An extraordinary operatic adaptation of 4.48 Psychosis by Philip Venables.

Hannah More. The Letters of Hannah More. A Digital Edition has been noted.

Mary More's feminist manifesto "The Womans Right Or Her Power in a Greater Equality to her Husband" has finally reached print, more than 350 years after she wrote it.

Mary Ann Radcliffe, Romantic-era feminist and memoirist, now has her birth family identified.

ALCS and the National Literacy Trust have set up a new annual award in memory of Ruth Rendell, to reward service to literacy.

J. K. Rowling, or the Rowling team, has conquered new territory, the stage, in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

The life of Eleanor Sleath, whose gothic writing attracted Jane Austen's attention, used to be a blank to history. Now we have a birth family for her, a social circle, a tragic first marriage, and a scandalous second marriage — thanks to the 'Sleath Sleuths' Rebecca Czlapinski and Eric C. Wheeler.

Julia Howe Ward: some revision consequent on Elaine Showalter's splendid new biography.

Mary Wollstonecraft: a street is to be named after her in the new King's Cross area, though the statue at Newington Green is still doubtful.

Free-standing events

With particular pleasure we enhanced the event on Edith Morley, the much-discriminated-against first woman professor at a British university, to mention her memoir Before and After: Reminiscences on a Working Life, which reached print for the first time this year.

A host of new material has been added on publications by authors without their own entries in Orlando; also on the Paris Commune, the Irish Land League and Ladies Land League, the first Irish parliament. The most recent newly-recorded event is the launch of the Women's Equality Party in Britain: it remains to be seen if we shall be hearing more about that.

Summary of Content

10 entries (7 British women writers, 2 other women writer, and 1 male writer); 22 new free-standing chronology entries; 291 new bibliographical listings; 23, 639 new tags; 81, 891 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2017

New Author Entries

Elizabeth Isham, 1609-54, diarist who kept both telegraphic and more expanded records of her life, with special attention to her social and spiritual struggles over her preference for remaining unmarried.
Anne Dacier, 1645-1720, French classical scholar, editor, and translator: for generations the type, model, and justification of the learned woman.
May Drummond, 1709/10-1777, Scottish Quaker pamphleteer and wildly popular preacher, who unlike most Quaker women ministers came from a successful and distinguished family.
Anna Jane Vardill, 1781-1852, Romantic-era poet whose couple of volumes are outshone by her extensive magazine contributions. She apparently stopped writing at her marriage.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1820-1921, first American woman ordained to the ministry, public speaker and author of philosophic, scientific, and theological works. Sister-in-law of the pioneering physician Elizabeth Blackwell.
Sophia Jex-Blake, 1840-1912, fighter for women's admission to medical education, unsuccessfully in England but successfully in Scotland (as Elizabeth Blackwell was in the USA). Her publications relate to her life's work in medicine and the advancement of women.
Eva Mary Bell, 1878-1959, novelist, mostly under the pseudonym of "John Travers". Her strong support for British rule in India drives the plot of some, though not all, of her novels.
Nan Shepherd, 1893-1981, Scottish author of three modernist novels, plus poetry and a book about the Cairngorm Mountains. She is about to be honoured with a portrait on the Scottish five-pound note.
Hannah Arendt, 1906-75, German-Jewish immigrant to the USA, well known as a philosopher, political theorist (especially on the topic of totalitarianism), and historian of the twentieth century.
Eudora Welty, 1909-2001, Southern American short-story writer and novelist.

Entries Enhanced

New Publications: Margaret Atwood, Catbird and Hag-seed; Anne Carson, FLOAT; Dinah Mulock Craik, The Half-Caste in a Broadview edition; Nawal El Saadawi, Diary of a Child Called Souad; Selima Hill, The Magnitude of my Sublime Existence; Susan Hill, The Travelling Bag and other Ghost Stories; Luce Irigaray, To Be Born; Jackie Kay, "Take Away"; Liz Lochhead, Fugitive Colours; Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems 1950-2012; Carol Rumens, Animal People; Zadie Smith, Swing Time.

Jane Austen: added a severe contemporary dismissal of the newly published Pride and Prejudice by Jane, Lady Davy (the great scientist's wife) as "a picture of vulgar minds and manners . . . unrelieved by the agreeable contrast of more dignified and refined characters."

Anne Carson has (as well as publishing FLOAT) appeared with Emily Berry and Sophie Collins in If I'm Scared We Can't Win: Penguin Modern Poets One (the latest series of Penguin Modern Poets, following those of 1962-75 and of 1995-7).

Agatha Christie: mention of the memorial to her in London's theatre district has been upgraded from a prophecy to a fact.

Gillian Clarke has come to the end of her term as National Poet of Wales—but then see Jackie Kay, below!

Catherine Gore: new and corrected information from Gary Simons, who is working on a biography.

Ann Jellicoe: a nice anecdote about T. S. Eliot in his publishing capacity and her play The Knack.

Elizabeth Jennings: a symposium held on her work in Oxford in October 2016.

Jackie Kay has been appointed Makar, the Poet Laureate of Scotland.

Gwen Moffat, aged 92, has been awarded honorary membership of the British Mountaineering Council; the short film "Operation Moffat" had Special Mention at the Banff Film Festival.

Mary More, author of "The Woman's Right", has had her Life screen virtually re-written from information provided by Frances Teague and Margaret J. M. Ezell in Educating English Daughters, 2016.

Alice Munro: celebrated Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodovar has transplanted Munro's Juliet (of "Chance", "Soon", and "Silence" in Runaway, 2004) to Spain in a film entitled Julieta.

Mary Palmer: we now know, thanks to Natasha Duquette in Veiled Intent, 2016, that this obscure Devon gentlewoman, explicator of the local dialect and sister of Frances Reynolds and Sir Joshua, was one of those whom Phillis Wheatley met on her visit to England.

Sarah Pearson: one of the many entries for which Orlando is grateful for research by Andrew Ashfield. We now know that she was Sarah not Susanna, and that she enjoyed a long, close, but almost undocumented friendship with Barbara Hofland.

J. K. Rowling: another phenomenally productive half-year, with the stage and print debut of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (not by her, but still) and the screen debut of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Free-standing events

Though the earliest event added this time dates from 1381, recent times account for a far larger share of added events than usual. Earth-shaking matters have been added: Britain's vote, on 23 June 2016, to leave the European Union; the USA's vote, on 8 November 2016, not to elect its first female presidential candidate, but instead an unrepentant male sexist and know-nothing. Years and generations will no doubt prove the relevance of these decisions to women, to literature, and to literature by women. Oh, and the UK also got its second female Prime Minister, Theresa May.

Summary of Content

10 entries (5 British women writers, 5 other women writers); 34 new free-standing chronology entries; 271 new bibliographical listings; 21, 480 new tags; 79, 896 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2017

New Author Entries

Grace, Lady Mildmay, c. 1552-1620. She left (and apparently intended for publication) a mass of medical writings, as well as religious meditations and an accompanying autobiography.
Grisell Murray, 1692-1759. Each of her parents had behaved heroically in the painful Covenanting period of Scottish history before she was born. She marked the death of each with a memoir, relating their lives with loving admiration.
Radagunda Roberts, c. 1730-1788, author of translations from French (including Françoise de Graffigny's Peruvian Letters), and of stories, poems — and a volume of sermons.
Eliza Dunlop, 1796-1880. A published poet before emigrating to Australia, she aroused controversy and condemnation as a settler for poems expressing sympathy for the persecuted Aborigines and their threatened culture. She also translated Aboriginal songs.
Mary Angela Dickens, 1862-1948. She adapted books by her famous grandfather Charles Dickens, and published her own novels, short stories, journalism, memoir, and religious works.
Mary McCarthy, 1912-89, US author in many genres (including political analysis and art and travel books), best remembered for her novels (especially The Group, 1963, about young women graduates in New York) and account of her early years.
Mavis Gallant, 1922-2014, Canadian writer who lived her adult life abroad, mostly in Paris. Her body of work consists largely of short stories. She left still largely unpublished journals.
Winsome Pinnock, b. 1961. Black British playwright, whose socially conscious work deals with matters of race and displacement, violence of many kinds, and relations between women of different races and generations.
Ali Smith, b. 1962. Scottish writer whose novels and short fiction are funny, iconoclastic, and cerebral, with a playful approach to literary allusion, wordplay, and unstable gender identities.
Naomi Alderman, b. 1974: critically acclaimed for novels (set in twentieth-century Jewish London, academic Oxford, Roman-ruled Palestine, and a future where women wield unprecedented power) and known in the digital world as creator of Zombies Run! and Perplex City.
Orlando grieves for Helen Dunmore, who died on 5 June 2017.

New Publications

A. S. Byatt, Peacock and Vine. Morris and Fortuny in Life and at Work; Helene Cixous, Politics, Ethics, and Performance; Nancy Cunard (posthumous), Selected Poems; Maureen Duffy, Past Present, Piers Plowless and Sir Orfeo; Helen Dunmore, in the year of her death, both Inside the Wave and Birdcage Walk; Elaine Feinstein, The Clinic, Memory; Antonia Fraser, Our Israeli Diary; Selima Hill, Splash like Jesus; Susan Hill, From the Heart; P. D. James (posthumous), The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories; Penelope Lively, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories; Grace Nichols, The Insomnia Poems; Penelope Shuttle, Will you Walk a little Faster?; Charlotte Smith, Major Poetic Works (Broadview); Gertrude Stein, the recently rediscovered "Let Us Save China"; Anne Stevenson, both In the Orchard: Poems with Birds, and About Poems and how poems are not about; Joanna Trollope, City of Friends; Fay Weldon, Death of a She Devil; Jeanette Winterson, Christmas Days. 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days. (Other new books, like Megan Marshall's biography of Elizabeth Bishop, and Cristanne Miller's edition Emily Dickinson's Poems As She Preserved Them, are merely noted).

Entries Enhanced

Anna Atkins: mention of "New Realities", major exhibition at the Riksmuseum in Amsterdam, summer 2017, centred on a copy of her masterpiece, Photographs of British Algae. Cyanotype Impressions, 1843.

Margaret Atwood: added insights (on topics like The All-Star Eclectic Typewriter Revue, and "Regional Romances; or, Across Canada by Pornograph") from The Burgess Shale, the printed version of her Henry Kreisel Lecture of 2016. Also on The Handmaid's Tale at the present historical moment.

Beryl Bainbridge: Brendan King's biography, which presents her life "openly and honestly for the first time", has yielded much that was not generally known. Her many lovers, her suicide attempts, her drinking, are not quite irrelevant; they illuminate the mysterious interdependence of life and writing.

Maria Barrell: Thanks to Andrew Ashfield her extraordinary life-story has been fleshed out: first marriage in Grenada, slave-owning, second marriage, the workhouse, and repeated prison terms for passing counterfeit money.

Enid Blyton: added a mention of Bruno Vincent's spoof series, Five Give up the Booze, Five on Brexit Island, etc.

Anna Eliza Bray: added mention of Diane Duffy's notion that Bray envisaged a national tale for England, to match those of Ireland and Scotland.

Angela Carter: mention of Emily Temple's website of startling "fan art": visual responses to Carter.

Margaret Catchpole: further information turned up in course of working on Eliza Dunlop.

Elizabeth Cooper, dramatist and pioneer of the historically-arranged poetry anthology: we just learned that a poetry volume of 1629, with her annotations, was on sale in 2015 at $11,500.

Agatha Christie: the BBC tv revival, at Christmas 2016, of Witness for the Prosecution.

Carol Ann Duffy as Poet Laureate collaborated with the people of the United Kingdom to produce the astonishing theatrical statement "My Country; a work in progress", which toured England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales in spring 2017.

George Eliot: the emergence of a pastel sketch which may represent her as a young woman.

Ethel Smyth: Retrospect Opera, who already put out a recording of The Boatswain's Mate, 1916, is now fund-raising to record her Fete Galante, 1922.

Mary Somerville: notice of her remarkable productions as a visual artist.

Helen Taylor: added her gift of J. S. Mill's English library, after his death, to the newly founded Somerville College, Oxford.

Josephine Tey: much new information about the life which she kept so private, from Jennifer Morag Henderson's biography.

Joanna Trollope: added her somewhat unedifying spat with J. K. Rowling about the latter's energetic tweeting of opinions on world politics.

Edith Wharton: the re-emergence of her lost play, "The Shadow of a Doubt", 1901.

Jeanette Winterson: mention of Oxford University's commissioning of her portrait as one of a new turn towards representing diversity.

Mary Wollstonecraft: mention of the novels by Nancy Means Wright in which she is a series detective.

Free-standing events

Thirty newly-added events run from 1358 (concerning Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking, who was arguably a liturgical dramatist) to this year (the Women's Marches which greeted the election of US President Donald Trump). Topics include the Free-Masons' Magazine, the Crimean War, the Women's Royal Air Force (later the Women's Auxiliary Air Force), and sociological studies following a cohort of the British populations born at various selected dates.

Summary of Content

10 entries (5 British women writers, 5 other women writers); 27 new free-standing chronology entries; 412 new bibliographical listings; 25,088 new tags; 92,918 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2018

New Author Entries

This batch of new entries remarkably reflects the international aspect of British women's writing. We have here authors of English, Irish, Welsh, New Zealand, Nigerian, and totally unknown origins and allegiances; we have careers largely pursued in Italy, Mexico, New Mexico, New York, and all around the world; we have intimate involvement with other cultures — not only the list just above, but also the Russian, Ukrainian, French, Polish, Ruthenian, and Yucatec Maya languages.

Mrs E. M. Foster, novelist whose attributions and whose very existence are contested, who published between 1795 and 1809 (or possibly even 1817). Her name is (arguably) linked with one particularly interesting text: The Woman of Colour, 1808.
Linda Villari, 1836-1915, novelist, journalist, travel writer and translator. Her novels tend to be thin on plot (often related to actual events and people) but were praised for the same descriptive powers as her non-fiction about Italy.
Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, 1851-1910, archaeologist and writer whose texts (from a travel diary to epic poems) sprang from her passion and her husband's for the ancient history of Yucatán in Mexico, and their field-work among the people there.
Ethel Lilian Voynich, 1864-1960, translator and novelist associated with the European revolutionary movements of the late nineteenth century. She rendered into English texts from Russian, Ukrainian, French, Polish, and Ruthenian, and scored a worldwide hit with her novel The Gadfly, 1897.
Daisy Ashford, 1881-1972, one of the most famous of child writers, remembered for her novel of love and social climbing The Young Visiters, written at the age of nine.
Dorothy Brett, 1883-1977, modernist painter whose best-known writing (among other memoirs and travel journals) is an account of her life-changing experience as friend and disciple of D. H. Lawrence.
Ngaio Marsh, 1895-1982, New Zealand detective-story writer who was also distinguished as a painter and a director of Shakespeare. She spent much of her life in England and the majority of her novels are set there.
Leonora Carrington, 1917-2011, Surrealist painter and writer who spent much of her life in Mexico, the US, and Europe, whose fiction and memoir often feature episodes of violence and social disruption from perspectives of girls and women.
Jan Morris, born 1926, Welsh trans journalist, travel writer, author of popular histories of the British Empire, and memoirist who is well-known for Conundrum, 1974, about the sex-change experience.
Bernardine Evaristo, born 1959, Black British author of verse novels as well as (later) prose fiction and short fiction. She actively promotes BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) writing in and well beyond academic communities.

New Publications

New Publications include Gillian Clarke, Zoology; Maureen Duffy, Past Present, Piers Plowless and Sir Orfeo; Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others; Ali Smith, Winter.

Entries Enhanced

Entries Enhanced. We hoped we might get away without death notices this time, but no. It is sad to have to report the deaths of novelists Buchi Emecheta and Emma Tennant and playwright Ann Jellicoe: three writers from different social worlds who each contributed to the rich patchwork of British women's writing.

Hélène Cixous: took it good-humouredly when she found herself featured in a sex scene in a novel by Laurent Binet which reached English as The Seventh Function of Language, 2017.

Grace Elliott or Eliot: updated from Major and Murden's biography. Who knew that she was born not Grace but Grissell, as her sister Jacintha was born Janet?

Anna Kavan: good news that Penguin Classics are doing an anniversary edition of Ice, 1967. Jonathan Lethem uses the word "ecocatastrophe" in writing of this book in the New York Times; this was known already, but the remark does bring out the timeliness of Ice.

Andrea Levy: recognitions added: Oprah's reading guide to The Long Song, an accolade from the Richard and Judy Book Club; a volume of critical essays.

Elizabeth Melvill or Melville: she has been honoured in Makars' Place in Edinburgh ("The Poets' Corner of the North") with a stone engraved with lines from her poetry.

Sylvia Pankhurst: in spring 2017 Jackie Mulhallen's play about her toured in a new version, featuring Sylvia in old age.

Harold Pinter: his widow Antonia Fraser discovered in his notebooks and printed in The Guardian his prescient little play or dialogue, "The Pres and the Officer", in which a US presidential decree goes out to nuke London.

Radagunda Roberts: added to this very recent entry a fuller explanation of what just might be implied in her unusual given name.

J. K. Rowling: the launch in August of the TV series Strike based on her crime novels.

Carol Rumens: her long-running "Poem of the Week" feature in The Guardian is now mentioned in her entry (as an ongoing publication) as well as in some other poets' entries.

Dodie Smith: performance of a musical based on I Capture the Castle.

Mary Somerville: her image figures on the new polymer Scottish ten-pound notes.

Emma Tennant: only after Tennant's death did Orlando add the information that in 2008 she had married her long-term partner for tax reasons.

Free-standing events

A dozen "new" events added, including dates in the history of the International Federation of University Women (now Graduate Women International).

Summary of Content

10 entries (10 British women writers); 12 new free-standing chronology entries; 307 new bibliographical listings; 24,556 new tags; 94,006 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2018

New Author Entries

Eglinton Wallace, ?1750-1803, poet, dramatist, and writer of prose (including one piece published as a sermon), freely expressing her mainly conservative views on politics and social issues. She pronounces uninhibitedly on politics, including the War of the First Coalition.
Mary Harcourt, 1780-1833, diarist and letter-writer, remarkable for her "Anecdotes Relating to the Years 1792-1795", written while her husband commanded the British army in the Netherlands during the War of the First Coalition.
B. M. Croker, 1847-1920, Irish novelist and short-fiction writer. Out of her large oeuvre, her novels set in India under the British Raj and her ghost stories command most interest today.
May Crommelin, 1859-1930, Ulster romance novelist and travel writer about South America. Her fictions, contemporary and historical, mix the unusual (a harem heroine, another who is "master" of a pack of foxhounds) with the conventional.
Kate Marsden, 1859-1931, controversial traveller to Siberia, campaigner to better the lives of sufferers from leprosy. The adulation that greeted her first travel book was later transformed into a sneering attack, probably aroused less by her actual writing than by her lesbian relationships.
Flora Macdonald Mayor, 1872-1932, novelist whose sympathetic interest in the lives of unmarried middle-class women was unusual for its day.
Ling Shuhua, 1904-90, Chinese author whose links with British culture, the Bloomsbury group in particular, give her modernism a distinctively cosmopolitan touch.
Carson McCullers, 1917-67, US novelist and short-story writer, whose small output is redolent both of the straitjacket of Southern history and of the proliferations of grotesque eccentricity among her characters.
Deborah Levy, born 1959, British experimental novelist and memoirist of South African origin, recently reviewed as 'a major contemporary writer who never pulls her punches'.
Kamila Shamsie, born 1973, Pakistani-born British novelist who won the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction. She is a third-generation of woman writers. Her grandmother published a memoir, Remembrance of Days Past, 2001, her great-aunt the novel Sunlight on a Broken Column, 1961, and her mother has edited anthologies of Pakistani writing for OUP and the Feminist Press.

New Publications (from the dead as well as the living)

Fleur Adcock, Hoard; Hannah Arendt, Thinking without a Banister; Wendy Cope, Christmas Poems and Anecdotal Evidence; Helen Dunmore, Girl, Balancing and Other Stories; Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics; Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon; Jackie Kay, Bantam; Julia Kristeva, The Enchanted Clock; Vernon Lee, The Psychology of an Art Writer; Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden; E. Nesbit, The Lark (new edition); Ann Quin, The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments; Ruth Rendell, A Spot of Folly; Vita Sackville-West, A Note of Explanation; Zadie Smith, Feel Free; Anne Stevenson, Beyond the Boundaries(with Eugene Dubnov); Rose Tremain, Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life.

Entries Enhanced

Shelagh Delaney: commemorations of A Taste of Honey sixty years after its debut.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Gillian Wearing's statue of her was unveiled in April 2018, the first statue of a woman to stand in Parliament Square, Westminster.

Susan Ferrier: Val McDermid's spirited bid to add Ferrier to the list of Edinburgh's recognized literary celebrities through her Resurrection event of street theatre in January 2018.

Antonia Fraser: made a Companion of Honour at new year 2018. Congratulations!

Margery Kempe: the conference devoted to her at Oxford in April 2018, and founding of the Margery Kempe Society.

Bryony Lavery: in a single week in February her new adaptation from Graham Greene and a revival of her Frozen both opened.

Mary Pix returned to the public stage when The Beau Defeated, 1700, was revived at Stratford, UK, under the title The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich. Pix's plot and dialogue stood up well to competition from comic business, gunshots, and large dogs on stage.

Muriel Spark: various editions commemorating her centenary this year.

Elizabeth Strutt: her missing birth and death dates, from the Protestant cemetery in Rome, with thanks as so often to Andrew Ashfield.

Rose Tremain: the story of her early life as revealed in her memoir Rosie; also the 2017 edition of her transgender novel Sacred Country, with introduction by Peter Tatchell.

Free-standing events

The death of Ursula K. Le Guin (who, we confess it, is still awaiting her Orlando entry) has led to events marking landmarks in her career. Life expectancy in Britain from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has been charted in more detail than before. 2018 has seen the entry of an avowed feminist into the royal family and a historic acceptance of abortion by the people of Ireland.

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers and 2 other women writers); 27 new free-standing chronology entries; 300 new bibliographical listings; 23,677 new tags; 92,629 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: January 2019

New Author Entries

Anne, Lady Southwell, 1574-1636, who with the support of her second husband collected her devotional and philosophical poems, with a few letters, aphorisms, and business records, into an unusual commonplace-book.
Anne Wentworth, 1629/30-1693, Baptist who challenged the authority of her husband and the elders of her congregation, publishing a series of polemical prophecies and tracts.
Anna Gordon, 1747-1810, also known as Mrs Brown, collector and performer of ballads, conduit for the Scottish women's tradition of song.
Jane Loudon, 1807-58, known in her own day as author of works on gardening and botany (leisure activity, scientific investigation, aesthetic creation), and of a science-fiction novel, The Mummy, 1827, which forecasts a range of technological inventions and improvements.
Anthony Trollope, 1815-82, popular and prolific male novelist, son and brother-in-law of women writers. Women are prominent among his gallery of fictional characters, and women's issues prominent in his socio/cultural vistas of English life.
Charlotte Barnard, 1830-69, composer of songs (both words and music) which were highly popular with amateur performers.
Clara Codd, 1876-1971, Theosophist writer publishing in India and the United States as well as in England.
Ursula K. Le Guin, 1919-2017, American writer of fiction (mostly science fiction, in which she was an influential figure) as well as poems, essays, and literary criticism.
Anne Enright, born 1962, Irish novelist, who has also written drama, short fiction, and journalism.
Helen Oyeyemi, born 1984, Nigerian-born British novelist who won fame at an early age. She has also written drama and short fiction.

New Publications

Gillian Allnutt, wake; Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls; Kate Clanchy, ed., England. Poems from a School; Helen Dunmore, Girl, Balancing and Other Stories; Sarah Chapone, The Hardships of the English Laws (1735), ed. Susan Glover; Carol Ann Duffy, Off the Shelf; Carol Ann Duffy, Sincerity; Helen Dunmore, "Envoi" in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary Short Story; Bernardine Evaristo, "Monologue. The Unthinkable"; Germaine Greer, On Rape; Elizabeth Kleinhenz, The Life of Germaine Greer; Susan Hill, The Comforts of Home; Susan Hill, Jacob's Room is Full of Books; Ruth Padel, Emerald; Ruth Pitter, Sudden Heaven. The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter. A Critical Edition, ed. Don W. King; Sylvia Plath, Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2; Adrienne Rich, Essential Essays, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert.; J. K. Rowling, Lethal White; J. K. Rowling, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald; Noel Streatfeild, Noel Streatfeild's Christmas Stories.

Entries Enhanced

Jane Austen: added her descent from Margaret Roper. How pleasing that Austen should have so brave and so talented a foremother!

Elizabeth Bishop: much revision from the biography by Megan Marshall.

Margaret Bryan: courtesy of research by Nicole Infanta Keller, added her involvement in the educational board game Science in Sport.

Augusta Ada Byron: a few details added in the light of recent comment: Miranda Seymour's life of her and her mother, and The Making of a Computer Scientist by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice.

Anne Carson: played the title role in Tacita Dean's short film Antigone (which incorporates poetry by Carson) at the Royal Academy, summer 2018.

Jane Cave: corrected birth date and place, courtesy of Andrew Ashfield's research. Also added from her father's bellicose religious tract that the vicar who christened her was then at daggers drawn with her father on questions of Methodist belief and practice.

Catherine Crowe revisions from research for new entry on Jane Loudon, who was a good friend to Crowe.

Bernardine Evaristo: her sizzling monologue in Mslexia, in the voice of a member of the wronged Windrush generation.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett: another woman writer honoured on her birthday with a Google Doodle.

Charlotte Lennox: much revision of detail from Susan Carlile's recent biography. Among a wealth of new literary information, it is nice to know that it was not the author but her thirteen-year-old daughter who appeared in court to face (quite likely false) charges of assault.

Andrea Levy: her essay "Back to my Own Country", published in 2014, appears online as an item in the British Library's exhibition Windrush Stories, along with family memorabilia and the manuscript of Small Island.

Florence Nightingale: a copy of Notes on Matters Affecting the Health . . . of the British Army, which she presented to Richard Monckton Milnes, was sold at Sotheby's in July 2018 for £13.750.

Amelia Opie: new or radically revised websites recorded: The Amelia Alderson Opie Archive, at http://post.queensu.ca/~mrsaopie/, and The Correspondence of Amelia Alderson Opie: A Digital Archive, at http://ameliaopieletters.com/aboutedition.html.

Winsome Pinnock: the London revival of her first play, Leave Taking.

Lady Hester Pulter: the availability of her manuscript at the Pulter Project, http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

Vita Sackville-West: her miniature book A Note of Explanation, published in 2017, originally in the miniature library of Queen Mary's Dolls' House in Windsor Castle, whose fairy protagonist lives for centuries into the modernity of the 1920s – setting, it seems, the example for Woolf's Orlando.

Kamila Shamsie gave the 2018 Orwell Lecture; The Guardian then published it as "Exiled".

Ali Smith and Zadie Smith have each had a novel translated to the stage, with varying degrees of shaking up and re-imagining.

Muriel Spark, a revival at the Edinburgh Festival of her 1962 "mega-flop", the farcical satire Doctors of Philosophy.

Free-standing events

More publication events involving authors without entries; moments in the history of the British census, the anti-nuclear movement, and the AIDS epidemic; recent public events mostly of the bad-news variety.

Summary of Content

10 entries (8 British women writers and 1 other women writer and 1 male writer); 24 new free-standing chronology entries; 331 new bibliographical listings; 21,540 new tags; 79,013 new words (exclusive of tags).

New: July 2019

New Author Entries

Alice Sutcliffe, c. 1605-c. 1633, religious writer in prose and verse. Her prose meditations end with a poem which discusses Eve's and Adam's respective responsibility for the Fall.
Dorothy Sidney Spencer, Countess of Sunderland, 1617-84, letter-writer, purveyor of court politics, called by a friend "the most eloquent pen in England."
Janet Schaw, c. 1737-1801, travel-writer, who described for a friend her journey to the Caribbean, the American colonies on the edge of revolution, and Portugal. She has a bad name today as an apologist for plantation slavery.
Ella D'Arcy, 1857-1937, short-story writer, New Woman, editor of The Yellow Book, translator.
Mabel Birchenough, 1859-1936, one of a whole family of women writers: author of a guidebook, three novels, and periodical writing.
Rosemary Sutcliff, 1920-92, disabled writer for children and young people, specialist in stirring stories set in the post-Roman era and the Dark Ages: in lesser-known periods of British history.
Flannery O'Connor, 1925-64, writer mainly of short stories set in the American South: neither among the white plantocracy nor the descendants of slaves, but among white people with severely limited horizons and hardscrabble lives.
Bessie Head, 1937-86, born into South African apartheid and exiled by it, living in Botswana, whose fiction is an exhilarating mix of the transcendental and the realistic.
Jean Binta Breeze, b. 1956, Jamaican-British performance poet, often classified against her own will as the first female dub poet.
Claire Keegan, b. 1968, Irish writer of minimalist short stories.

New Publications

Carol Ann Duffy, Collected Poems (expanded from 2015 edition); Helen Dunmore, Counting Backwards. Poems 1975-2017; Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other; P. D. James, "The Victim" (and other writers' stories reprinted from collections by Faber as stand-alone slim paperbacks); Jan Morris, In My Mind's Eye: A Thought Diary; Toni Morrison, A Mouth Full of Blood (published in the USA as The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations); Margaret Oliphant, "The Library Window" as a stand-alone book; Sylvia Plath, "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom"; Adrienne Rich, Selected Poems 1950-2012; Ali Smith, Spring.

Entries Enhanced

Frances Neville, Baroness Abergavenny: entry now records, courtesy of research by Louise Horton, the many reprintings of much of her writing from the 16th to the 18 century.

Enid Blyton: a theatrical version of Malory Towers played at Bristol Old Vic this summer.

Charlotte Brontë: her lost manuscripts (a long poem and a short story) discovered in a book that once belonged to her mother, published by the Brontë Society on 1 November 2018.

Sarah Chapone: new information from Susan Glover's edition of her ground-breaking feminist treatise, 1735 (also some details on Mary Delany).

Kate Clanchy: cited in Anne Youngson's Meet Me at the Museum.

Ann Batten Cristall: added biographical detail from research by Charlotte MacKenzie.

Susannah Dobson new information from research by Andrew Ashfield.

Daphne Du Maurier: early poems discovered in back of photo frame.

Radclyffe Hall: her manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center now digitized and available.

Jane Loudon: additions and corrections courtesy of the research of Andrew Ashfield.

Hope Mirrlees: the premiere, June 2019, of a music-and-dance version of her now upsettingly topical poem Paris, about the city ravaged by war.

Beatrix Potter: that disastrous film of Peter Rabbit.

Anne Sexton: discovery of some early poems, unknown although in full sight.

Githa Sowerby: not one but two new revivals of Rutherford and Son, which seems now assured in its classic status.

Rose Tremain: controversial opinions about contemporary poetry.

Anna Jane Vardill: added mention of the Vardill Society and ongoing work on her manuscripts.

Priscilla Wakefield: another author who now has the tribute of a fine website.

Free-standing events

Added events are mostly recent, reflecting either the current turmoil over global issues affecting us all, or else developments in the area of social media.

Summary of Content

10 entries (6 British women writers, 4 other women writers); 18 new free-standing chronology entries; 224 new bibliographical listings; 18,027 new tags; 71,049 new words (exclusive of tags).