Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Emily Dickinson
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Standard Name: Dickinson, Emily
Birth Name: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
is primarily known for her poems; she was also a letter writer. She published very little during her lifetime and the full scope of her output—some 1,775 poems—was discovered only after her death.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf.
4
ED
's verse thoroughly engages with the issue of identity, how best to be.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf.
9
She is held to be among the best and most original of nineteenth-century US poets.
Following an epigraph from Emily Dickinson
, Tell all the truth but tell it slant,CS
here experiments with melodrama, coincidence, and other infringements on naturalism.
Wachtel, Eleanor, editor. “Carol Shields”. More Writers and Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel, Vintage Canada, pp. 36-56.
37
She also experiments with many voices, including what...
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese
as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Desai
AD
's work weaves together a wide range of cultural and literary references: the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgîtâ, as well as such European authors as E. M. Forster
, T. S. Eliot
, Dickinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Desai
Influenced by Eliot
's Four Quartets, Clear Light of Day deals with time as destroyer and preserver, and with what the bondage of time does to people.
Gopal, N. Raj. A Critical Study of the Novels of Anita Desai. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.
90
It is structured as a four...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
Imagery of postpartum fluidity, particularly lactation, characterizes the lovers' growing passion and the descriptions of female sexual desire and orgasm. The narrative alternates between a schizoid third-person dialogue
Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Penguin.
130
and first-person narration as Jane attempts...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sylvia Kantaris
The poems here are full of places—real ones, like St Ives, Zennor, a rain-forest in Queensland, Australia; also the dystopias of Snapshotland (where everyone is happy all the time.)
Kantaris, Sylvia. The Sea at the Door. Secker and Warburg.
4
and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Shuttle
The first book that affected PS
deeply was Brontë
's Jane Eyre, with whose protagonist she identified.
Steffens, Daneet. “Penelope Shuttle”. Mslexia, No. 33, pp. 46-8.
48
At fifteen she read T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
and conceived a wish to be...
Friends, Associates
Sylvia Townsend Warner
US poet Genevieve Taggard
launched a literary friendship (and correspondence, from which Warner's surviving eighteen letters have recently been published) when she sent Warner a poem in 1941. Taggard was a poet particularly appreciated by...
Friends, Associates
Julia Ward Howe
JWH
first encountered Higginson
(the friend and correspondent of Emily Dickinson
) at a Boston rally in support of the fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins
.
Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences, 1819–1899. Houghton Mifflin.
165
Howe was living at 241 Beacon Street in Boston...
Family and Intimate relationships
Joan Aiken
JA
's father was Conrad Aiken
(1889-1973), born in Savannah, Georgia: a modernist poet, critic, and editor of Emily Dickinson
. He had been publishing poetry for ten years when Joan was born, and...
Education
Tillie Olsen
At home the Lerner children learned Yiddish songs and made up silly plays.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
27
Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
Education
Penelope Shuttle
At seventeen, she says (after the successive discoveries of Charlotte Brontë
, T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
), she began reading Rilke
. Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.