Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, T. S.
Used Form: Thomas Stearns Eliot
TSE
, an American settled in England, was the dominant voice in English poetry during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as an immensely influential critic. His early experimental poems excel at catching an atmosphere or mood, often a moment of stasis and self-doubt. The Waste Land, a brilliant collage of fragments, has been seen to express the fears of a whole society about the threatened end of culture and amenity called civilization. After Eliot's conversion to Christianity his poetry moved to sombre investigations of the spiritual life: of time, fate, decision, guilt, and reconciliation. Meanwhile his criticism grappled with the the relation of past to present in terms of the contemporary relationship to tradition. TSE
also wrote lively comic verse, and in theatrical writing he moved on from pageant and historical religious drama to symbolic representation of spiritual issues through events in banal daily life.
According to biographer Suzanne Raitt
, MS
sometimes used aspects of her own experience in her stories. The Pin-Prick, 1915, about a young woman so sensitive that she kills herself in response to a...
death
Lady Ottoline Morrell
Before her death LOM
named three literary executors, including her friend Hope Mirrlees
. Her literary estate consisted primarily of letters, journals, and her drafted memoirs.
Seymour, Miranda. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
At school she adored reading Milton
, and used to walk around chanting Eliot
to myself: Every streetlamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum. from hisRhapsody on a Windy Night.
Evans-Bush, Katy. “The Poet Realized. An Interview with Ruth Fainlight”. Contemporary Poetry Review.
Yorke, Liz. Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics, and the Body. Sage, 1997.
7
Rich enjoyed her time at Radcliffe, though...
Education
Elaine Feinstein
She later felt she was lucky to be a postwar student; before then, she would have been as out of place at Newnham as Amy Levy
. Christianity was everywhere
Feinstein, Elaine. It Goes with the Territory. Alma, 2013.
DA
was taught at home by governesses (seven successively before she was sent to school), who followed a correspondence course designed for home schooling which was known as Parents Educational National Union
. A French...
Education
Penelope Shuttle
At seventeen, she says (after the successive discoveries of Charlotte Brontë
, T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
), she began reading Rilke
. Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.
Mslexia. Mslexia Publications.
47
Education
Margaret Atwood
From 1957 she attended Victoria College
, University of Toronto
. Canadian publishing and the arts in Canada, broadly considered, had not yet recovered from the second world war. There were no cheap reprints of...
Education
Bernice Rubens
At university, she was President of both the student Music and Socialist societies, as well as a member of the Students' Union Council.
Gilbert, Sarah. “Bernice Rubens”. Cardiff University Magazine, No. 1.
BR
later found that her education slowed her development as a writer...
Education
Edna O'Brien
O'Brien meanwhile cultivated her passion for reading and writing. The first book she purchased was Introducing James Joyce, edited by T. S. Eliot
: this volume, she notes, made me realize that I wanted...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Employer
Anne Ridler
AR
worked at Faber & Faber
as secretary and copy-editor, first for Richard de la Mare
and from late 1936 for T. S. Eliot
. Her duties included helping Eliot select poetry for The Criterion...
Family and Intimate relationships
Q. D. Leavis
Though both husband and wife were to influential, F. R. Leavis became one of the leading literary critics of the twentieth century. A dynamic speaker and teacher, he was known for his uncompromising, exclusive, often...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Wesley
In wartime London in 1944 she met journalist, linguist, and playwright Eric Siepmann
.
Wright, Daphne. “Mary Wesley”. Guardian Weekly.
19
Marnham, Patrick. Wild Mary: the Life of Mary Wesley. Chatto and Windus, 2006.
127
While they dined in the same restaurant, but not together, he sent her a series of increasingly drunken notes...
Timeline
1899
Arthur Symons
published The Symbolist Movement in Literature, with an epigraph from Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
.
The last issue of The Egoist: An Individualist Review was published.
10 April 1925
US author F. Scott Fitzgerald
published his novelThe Great Gatsby, which probes the consequences of success in the competitive pursuit of the great American dream. Zelda Fitzgerald
came up with the title for...
After February 1932
An appeal of Count Potocki of Montalk
's case was heard; and although he was not cleared, an advance in obscene libel cases was made.
Early 1936
The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts
(who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot
), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...
1953
The Poetry Book Society
was founded, largely through the efforts of T. S. Eliot
, to promote the reading of poetry.
