Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charles Dickens
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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.
Looking back on her early education, MC
wrote I managed to develop into a curiously determined independent little personality, with ideas and opinions more suited to some clever young man. . . . I instinctively...
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
Education
Daisy Ashford
DA
's mother, Emma
, was an avid reader, and an unconventional amateur writer whose verses included brisk lines, slang, and knockabout humour.
Malcomson, R. M. Daisy Ashford: Her Life. Chatto & Windus.
53
She inscribed books that she gave away as gifts...
Education
Rosemary Sutcliff
Rosemary's mother was probably her most important teacher. She told her stories which, no matter how outlandish and fantastic, the very young Rosemary accepted as literal truth; she later imparted all kinds of varied information...
Education
Winifred Peck
It was probably Mary A. Marzials
' anthology Gems of English Poetry which made poetry the only lesson the Knoxes disliked. Winifred felt that Hemans
's boy on the burning deck cut a poor figure...
Family and Intimate relationships
Berta Ruck
Her Welsh grandmother, born Mary Anne Mathews
, whom she called Nain, had kept a youthful journal, some of which BR
prints.
AM
's mother, Christiana Weller
(later Thompson), was born in 1825. A concert pianist and painter, she met her husband, then a widower, at a Liverpool Mechanics' Institute
reception in 1844. They were married on...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eleanor Farjeon
EF
's father, Benjamin Leopold Farjeon
, grew up in a poor, orthodox, Jewish household in the East End of London. At thirteen he was working as an errand-boy for a Christian newspaper, avidly...
MD
was a great-grand-daughter of the novelist Charles Dickens
.
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
FET
and her two sisters, Maria and Ellen or Nelly, were close to their mother and to each other, and were considered well-behaved and dutiful. All three performed on stage together when the girls were...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
attended the last public reading by her grandfather Charles Dickens
, held at St James's Hall, London three months before he died. He performed excerpts from A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers at the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Dickens
, on the other hand, though fond of both the Trollopes and the Ternans, apparently confided that he did not in the least care for Fanny, whom he judged, with evident misgivings, to be...
Family and Intimate relationships
Marie Corelli
MC
's stepfather—and possible biological father or grandfather—Charles MacKay (born 1814), was a writer and editor. Among the periodicals he worked for were the Morning Chronicle, alongside Charles Dickens
; the Daily Telegraph...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
In 1867, the year after their marriage, FET
and her husband separated for a while. They publicly said little of their troubles; they may have had disagreements over the scandal surrounding Ellen Ternan
and Charles Dickens
