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.
Though FT
continues to be viewed as a caustic, prejudiced critic of unfamiliar social manners, as well as a snobbish middle-class Englishwoman eager to attack those she perceived to be beneath her, her travel journals...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
In the capacity of the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor, AS
delivered four lectures to students of European Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford
. Considering her stated dislike of lecturing from her days at Strathclyde
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Sykes
The comic character-drawing in this book may have been an influence on Dickens
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Angela Thirkell
The protagonist is a young married woman up from the country to see the coronation. AT
said the characters were all [her] own invention, but she included among them Dickens
's Miss Flite from Bleak...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
303-4
Literary responses
Harriett Jay
This novel fared badly at the hands of the Academy, which called it far from dull . . . even bright and easy, but fatally lack[ing] the strength and freshness we naturally expect from...
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
Both Charlotte Brontë
and Charles Dickens
mentioned the appearance of this novel in their letters.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
12
MO
was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott
(Grace Greenwood) that...
Literary responses
Charlotte Maria Tucker
Critic J. S. Bratton
calls this book the kind of perversion of well-loved stories which Dickens
and others found so reprehensible. She nevertheless maintains that Tucker tells the tales with some zest.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Croom Helm.
The Athenæum's Henry Fothergill Chorley
said that we have met with few pictures of life among the working classes at once so forcible and so fair as Mary Barton.
Easson, Angus, editor. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge.
62
He compared the...
Literary responses
Anna Steele
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott
, George Eliot
, and Charles Dickens
), it nonetheless has...
Literary responses
Amelia B. Edwards
John Cordy Jeaffreson
paid this novel the compliment of a three-column Athenæum review. He predicted eventual success as a novelist for its author, even though he found grave faults in her present production. ABE
...
