Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charles Dickens
-
Standard Name: Dickens, Charles
Birth Name: Charles John Huffam Dickens
Indexed Name: Charles Dickens
Pseudonym: Boz
Pseudonym: Timothy Sparks
A prolific novelist, journalist, and editor of periodicals such as Household Words and All the Year Round, CD
crucially shaped Victorian fiction both by developing it as a dialogical, multi-plotted, and socially aware form and by his innovations in publishing serially. As a novelist he worked across a range of genres, including the bildungsroman, picaresque, Newgate, sensation and detective fiction, and usually with satiric or socially critical force. He was loved by readers for his humour, grotesquerie, action, and vigour. An influential public figure and phenomenally successful lecturer during his lifetime, his work continues to be central to popular understandings of nineteenth-century England, and in particular London.
JMR
's study of mainstream novelists like Dickens
is apparent in Ada, in his borrowing from texts like Oliver Twist. Ada is an orphan who, like Oliver, captivates the reader in her quest...
Textual Features
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Stowe
's introduction praises CET
's works as a safe and desirable acquisition in every christian [sic] and family library in our country.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. “Introduction”. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Dodd, p. v - vii.
vii
She compares CET
's descriptions of factory life to those of...
Textual Features
Frances Sarah Hoey
Miriam finds local gossip that Florence is attempting to entrap her father ludicrous, and describes it as a comic parallel to Vanity Fair, with Florence not as Becky Sharp but as Amelia having to...
Textual Features
Harriette Wilson
The book itself opens with an image presenting HW
's writing as showmanship: Lions and Tigers just arrived for the coronation. Walk in ladies and gentlemen. . . . Only six francs, to see all...
Textual Features
Margaret Forster
The novel, entitled Green Dusk for Dreams, drew on her own experience as an au pair girl in Bordeaux. At different times she called it Dickens
ian
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
Textual Features
Joan Aiken
Dickens
, whose novels JA
and her sister heard their mother reading aloud when they were children, is a shaping influence on these works: their teeming characters (with names like Miss Slighcarp and in later...
Textual Features
E. Nesbit
At the opening of The Treasure Seekers the narrator, Oswald Bastable, says he will not reveal which child is telling the story; yet already he is dropping unmistakable hints that it is himself. Oswald wavers...
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Anita Brookner
The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
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Charlotte Riddell
This evidently very saleable story followed the recipe laid down by Dickens
in A Christmas Carol in 1843, for a haunting which works a positive moral transformation. Hertford O'Donnell fell out with his parents as...
This is often mistaken for FB
's own autobiography, but it is in fact a novel, narrated in the form of an autobiography by a boy named Frederick (alternately Frederic) Favoursham. Beginning My Share of...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jenkins
This little book (with no notes or index) opens on an echo of Jenkins's fuller work on Austen, with a tribute to the mid eighteenth century as a time of brilliant flowering in the English...
Textual Features
Lady Margaret Sackville
Austen
, she says, was the first really modern novelist . . . more modern in a sense than Dickens
or Thackeray
.
Austen, Jane. “Introduction”. Jane Austen, edited by Lady Margaret Sackville, Herbert & Daniel, p. ix - xvi.
xi
This publication, together with the anthology, suggests that LMS
was pursuing...
Textual Production
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Though HBS
was internationally recognized for her written works she was not, unlike many other contemporary literary figures, a frequent lecturer. While Dickens
, Samuel Clemens
(who published as Mark Twain), Julia Ward Howe
...
