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.
A recurring theme in Cranford is the resistance to change of this insular group—who are convinced, for instance, that robberies must be perpetrated by strangers and that a Signor Brunoni, who turns out to...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
She was paid £300 for the serial form of the book, £50 more than initially promised. This, her first serialised novel, produced fierce arguments with Dickens
over everything from the overall length to the conclusions...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
In keeping with the policies of Household Words and All the Year Round, EG
's short fiction continued to appear there anonymously. She earned significant income from it, for Dickens
paid her at least...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
Strained in her relationship with Dickens
, and despite not entirely easy relations with Thackeray
, EG
placed Curious if True in the first issue of Thackeray's new Cornhill Magazine in February 1860.
Some pressure...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
She again came into conflict with Dickens
, who against her wishes inserted the word dark in the title, stressing the melodrama rather than the mundane in the story of murder and paternal possessiveness in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Like her first novel to see print, Gee says, this one took seven years to find a publisher. Speaking about it at a date fairly early in its long quest for print, she mentioned that...
Residence
Rumer Godden
Though she still found it hard to write in the country, RG
called this the happiest house we have had.
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan.
170
Three years later she suddenly moved again; she missed London, and felt her elder...
In an extraordinary passage near the end of the book, Cecil lists a number of people who might, if they could only work together, revolutionize the country.
Farrell, John P. “Toward a New History of Fiction: The Wolff Collection and the Example of Mrs. Gore”. The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, Vol.
37
, pp. 28-37.
36
The names he mentions include actual...
Education
Sarah Grand
There she read authors such as Dickens
, Scott
, and Thackeray
.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge.
253
She took advantage of the cultivated atmosphere in which she grew up, and yet later judged that she had been neither...
Reception
Sarah Grand
Reviewers in the Independent and The Bookman disliked this novel. The Bookman called it vulgar, and worse than vulgar.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge.
518
Arnold Bennett
, in Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1891), was equally...
Friends, Associates
Anna Maria Hall
One of AMH
's closest friends was the actress Helen Faucit
, later Lady Martin. Though socially conservative in her attitudes, she was apparently more ready than her husband to achieve friendly relations with those...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Maria Hall
The book provides a harsh critique of English boarding schools. Its account of school life may be autobiographical.
Keane, Maureen. Mrs. S.C. Hall: A Literary Biography. Colin Smythe.
110
In a footnote AMH
refers to Dickens
's Nicholas Nickleby: It may be necessary to...
Literary responses
Anna Maria Hall
Dickens
, however, wrote in April 1844 to congratulate her on another periodical article (something on governesses in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal). He felt that she had provided an immense relief among the typical contributions...
Textual Features
Janet Hamilton
The vigour and originality of her voice on women's issues requires greater recognition, ranging as it does from the satiric Crinoline, to Contrasted Scenes from Real Life which juxtaposes the earthly lot of Lady Emily Hay
