Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Lucy Aikin
-
Standard Name: Aikin, Lucy
Birth Name: Lucy Aikin
Pseudonym: L. A.
Pseudonym: Mary Godolphin
Pseudonym: L. A.
LA
's famous relations made her modest about her creative writing. Publishing during the early nineteenth century, she has to her credit a major poem expressing revisionist historical and feminist ideas, and an interesting novel, as well as much biographical and historical scholarship and some writing for children. She was a pioneer in the writing of cultural history concerned with social environment as well as events. A number of her letters were published after her death.
Benger was drawn to write of Anne Boleyn not by the personal scandals surrounding her but by her importance to the history of religion. Like her later books about royal personages, this one celebrates the...
Occupation
Elizabeth Strickland
ES
duly began writing for children and editing a periodical, but this was a temporary measure. They formed the intention of publishing historical memoirs or biographies. (Both biography collections and the memoir as a new...
Occupation
Anna Letitia Barbauld
At some time before November 1773, while the engaged pair were casting around for a means of earning money, Countess Spencer
(perhaps, but only perhaps, with the support of Elizabeth Montagu
, and quite possibly...
Material Conditions of Writing
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
She wrote it before the death of Catharine Macaulay
, though it appeared afterwards. Lucy Aikin
said she wrote it at about fifteen, which exaggerates her youth by only a year.
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.126
Her...
Literary responses
Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
Literary responses
Eliza Fletcher
She received letters of praise and congratulation on this publication from a number of distinguished pens. Anne Grant
wrote characteristically that they far exceeded my expectations. She had expected exalted moral feeling, purity of sentiment...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
J. W. Croker
's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey
) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Reviews were mixed, some praising her for accuracy and good judgement as a biographer, some doubting the value of the letters, and some employing a vocabulary of delicacy and related terms which was becoming de...
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnstone
, asked that two of JB
's last plays be translated into Singalese.One—The Bride, A Tragedy (published in summer 1828), had a Singalese subject.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
38 (1828): 602
Literary responses
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
The notice in the Analytical Review, which may have been written by Wollstonecraft
, is curiously unenthusiastic.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering.
7: 416-17
At the time of EOB
's death, Lucy Aikin
called The Female Geniada poem...
Literary responses
Lucy Toulmin Smith
As an anonymous writer for the Times rather oddly phrased it in an obituary, LTS
's services to English scholarship and literature were altogether out of proportion to her notoriety.
“Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith”. Times, No. 39774, p. 11.
39774 (1911):11
Although she is...
Intertextuality and Influence
Barbara Hofland
Barbara Hoole engages her reader through expressions both of emotion and of opinion. Though she handles some political topics (rejoicing, for instance, at the peace of Amiens in 1802), she is preoccupied by the personal...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
MAK
's opinions are always idiosyncratic and interesting, but she is not a feminist. She quotes Lucy Aikin
on being wounded by the privileged insolence of masculine discourse,
Kelty, Mary Ann. The Solace of a Solitaire. Trübner and Co.
332
only to disagree. I confess that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Wentworth Morton
The title-page quotes romantic, melancholy lines from Byron
's Childe Harold.
Bottorff, William K., and Sarah Wentworth Morton. “Introduction”. My Mind and its Thoughts, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, pp. 5-16.
12
An Apology closing the volume speaks of SWM
's disappointments and distresses (which are often mentioned, though unspecified, in her work) especially...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB
was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley
, who had already...
