Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Harriet Beecher Stowe
-
Standard Name: Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Birth Name: Harriet Elizabeth Beecher
Married Name: Harriet Elizabeth Stowe
HBS
is best known for the highly sentimental and influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, although she also authored several other novels, short stories, children's stories, pamphlets, a good deal of journalism, and a biography of Lady Byron
(mother of the mathematician and scientist Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace
). Much of her journalism was evangelical in tone. HBS
's reputation peaked with Uncle Tom's Cabin, after which her cultural standing declined.
SOJ
had a broad social circle. She belonged to an artistic community of women that included Celia Thaxter
and Louise Guiney
, and counted Harriet Beecher Stowe
(whose funeral she and Annie Fields
attended in...
Friends, Associates
Camilla Crosland
CC
's friends and acquaintances were varying and numerous. In her youth the radical politician John Cartwright
was a neighbour. Her literary work as an adult led to the formation of a number of lasting...
Friends, Associates
Sojourner Truth
ST
's vocation brought her into contact with many eminent people, from Abraham Lincoln
downwards. She shared a platform with Frederick Douglass
on a famous occasion when she challenged his faith by demanding whether God...
Friends, Associates
Anna Leonowens
While she held her teaching position, AL
made friends with many of the women living at Nang Harm, the imperial harem. One pupil, Lady Son Klin, worked daily in Anna's classroom on a translation...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Well known and much admired in her lifetime, ESP
enjoyed friendships with many important literary figures, including publisher James Fields
(who has been described as Christ-like in sympathy and kindness)
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. Chapters From a Life. Houghton, Mifflin.
145
and his wife...
Friends, Associates
Anna Leonowens
In 1872 AL
met John Paine
, a wealthy older man with an interest in literature and a fan of her writing. Through Paine she was introduced to the elite of the New York arts...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
During her time in Italy she came into contact with a number of other women who revered her as a successful female artist. She met actress Charlotte Cushman
and writer Matilda Hays
; she understood...
Family and Intimate relationships
Augusta Ada Byron
A slightly different picture is painted by Julia Markus in a biographical study entitled Lady Byron and her Daughters, 2015 (which counts Medora Leigh as an adopted daughter). This concentrates on Lady Noel Byron's...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mildred Cable
Another child, Little Lonely, was a deaf mute sold by her parents and abandoned by her owner. MC
, Evangeline and Francesca took her in, named her Ai-Lien Gai
from MC
's Chinese name...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sarah Orne Jewett
Fields and Jewett had many nicknames for each other: SOJ
was sometimes Pinny Lawson, or P. L., an amalgam of her family nickname and the surname of the village storyteller Sam Lawson in...
Family and Intimate relationships
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
CPG
's father, Frederick Beecher Perkins
, descended from the prominent Beecher family and counted abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe
among his immediate forebears. Frederick's anxiety about his ability to live up to his family...
Family and Intimate relationships
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte's Beecher aunts provided her with some valuable role models. As grandniece of the celebrated domestic novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe
, she was well versed in ideas about nineteenth-century domesticity and was used to the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Her grandmothers were also highly visible in their communities, expected to fulfill idealized social and familial expectations. Her maternal grandmother's life was memorialized in a poem by Harriet Beecher Stowe
in 1867 as a patient...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ann Bridge
Marie Louise (Day) Sanders
, AB
's mother, was an American from New Orleans, Louisiana (where her English husband met her on a business trip). She died in 1922
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Hoehn, Matthew, editor. Catholic Authors. St Mary’s Abbey.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
