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.
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.
2
, No. 1, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 47-52.
47
despite her enormous output...
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Susan Hill
SH
was herself a contributor to People. In The Lighting of the Lamps, 1986, she collects her own critical essays (about reading, and about authors like Dickens
, John Wain
, and Jean Rhys
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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
...
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Margaret Kennedy
In the years between the 1926 staging of The Constant Nymph and the appearance of Escape Me Never!, MK
co-wrote with Basil Dean
the play Come With Me (1934), and adapted Charles Dickens
's...
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Jean Plaidy
JP
had begun writing some years before this first publication.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, 4 July 1991, pp. 23-4.
23
During the 1930s she produced nine long novels, in which she tried to emulate her literary heroes (theBrontësEmily Brontë
, George Eliot
,...
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Lettice Cooper
LC
issued further biographies of eminent Victorians designed for young people: The Young Florence Nightingale, 1960, The Young Victoria, 1961, The Young Edgar Allan Poe, 1964, and A Hand Upon the Time...
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Anne Mozley
Bishop John Wordsworth
wrote in his posthumous memoir of AM
that no one out of her own family circle knew or even suspected that she practised authorship and editing work as an occupation. When she...
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Frances Isabella Duberly
Selina was to have a free hand about printing this letter in as many papers as she liked, but preferably including the Daily News (the paper of Charles Dickens
and Harriet Martineau
) or the Herald.
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Caroline Chisholm
From March 1852 to September 1853 a fictionalized version of CC
appeared as Mrs Jellyby in Charles Dickens
's novel Bleak House.
Kiddle, Margaret, and Sir Douglas Copland. Caroline Chisholm. 2nd ed., Melbourne University Press, 1957.
165
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
71
Dickens held that charity should begin at home, and his...
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Anne Thackeray Ritchie
She ranges through much of literary history, paying attention to figures such as Anna Seward
and Mrs John Taylor
(mother of Sarah Austin
) as well as men like Charles Dickens
. Among her non-literary...
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Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
published Dickens' Dream Children, a volume of stories adapted for young readers about young characters in Charles Dickens
's fiction.
Initially, Victoria was unreceptive to the idea of widespread publication of her journal extracts, arguing (according to Helps in his Editor's Preface) that she had no skill whatever in authorship; that these were, for the...
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Q. D. Leavis
To mark the centenary of Charles Dickens
's death, QDL
and F. R. Leavis
published Dickens: The Novelist, their reassessment of his cultural significance, dedicated by each to the other.
MacKillop, Ian. F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. Allen Lane, 1995.
369, 372
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Agatha Christie
MGM
commissioned AC
, following its successful film of her Murder She Said, to write a filmscript for Dickens
's Bleak House.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(20 February 1962: 13
It does not appear that this movie was ever made.
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Q. D. Leavis
The great parts written by QDL
have not been identified, let alone the weight of her input overall, and scholars are divided over her claims to substantial co-authorship. In the same year, 1995, Ian MacKillop
