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.
MEB
infused a touch of poetry more literally by frequent allusion to works by Tennyson
, including Mariana, The Deserted House, and The Lotos-Eaters. Her trademark use of other authors' texts as...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Dickens
's daughter Kate
recalled this as her father's favourite among MEB
's novels, and George Moore
liked it so much he represented his heroine in A Mummer's Wife (1885) as reading it. It may...
Education
Anita Brookner
AB
's father urged her to read Dickens
, for the purpose of understanding what the English were like, and also of understanding the unfairness of things.
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan.
5
She began reading Dickens at the age...
Textual Features
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
The protagonist and first-person narrator, Zoë Cunningham, like other Brookner heroines, has difficulty extricating her own life from that of her widowed mother. In this case the mother, Anne, is twice widowed: Simon, whom she...
Textual Features
Frances Browne
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...
Education
Pearl S. Buck
Mr Kung despised fiction and the Sydenstricker library contained only the supposedly factual Plutarch
's Lives and Foxe
's Book of Martyrs, but Pearl read fiction avidly in both Chinese and English, devouring Shakespeare
Occupation
Sarah Harriet Burney
SHB
held her most glamorous and successful governess position, with the family of Lord Crewe (who also employed the parents of Charles Dickens
as butler and housekeeper).
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
xlvii, xlix
Allen, Michael. “Frances Anne Crewe”. Burney Letter, Vol.
12
, No. 2, pp. 9-10.
9
Textual Features
Sarah Harriet Burney
These letters show her to be a rewarding, informal, up-to-the-minute literary critic. She kept remarkably up to date on the topic of women's writing, showing herself consistently receptive to new styles and new ideas. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Josephine Butler
JB
's Appeal to the Women of America recounts the history of her involvement with the repeal campaign, as well as her reasons for shifting the focus of her energies from the campaign seeking higher...
Friends, Associates
Augusta Ada Byron
AAB
remained close friends with Mary Somerville's family, and particularly with her eldest son by her first marriage, Woronzow Greig
, for the rest of her life. Somerville not only fostered Ada's mathematical aptitude, but...
Health
Augusta Ada Byron
Eventually Ada required heavy doses of laudanum to lessen the pain of her lengthy decline.
Woolley, Benjamin. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter. Macmillan.
353-5
On 19 August 1852 her friend Charles Dickens
complied with her wish that he should visit her deathbed to...
Friends, Associates
Jane Welsh Carlyle
JWC
attended a dinner party given by Charles Dickens
; she felt it to be ostentatious.
Surtees, Virginia. Jane Welsh Carlyle. Michael Russell.
203-4
Friends, Associates
Jane Welsh Carlyle
As his fame grew, Thomas was increasingly invited to the homes of London's political and intellectual elite, while Jane moved in her own social circle, which included Charles Dickens
, John Forster
, Giuseppe Mazzini
Textual Production
Jane Welsh Carlyle
Many, including Charles Dickens
, have speculated that JWC
could have produced wonderful novels, and because she did not she is often viewed as something of a missing woman writer
Christianson, Aileen. “Rewriting Herself: Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Letters”. Scotlands: The International, Interdisciplinary Journal of Scottish Culture, Vol.
