Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Harold Pinter
-
Standard Name: Pinter, Harold
Used Form:
Pseudonym: David Baron
Pseudonym: Harold Pinta
Best-known as one of the leading British playwrights of the later twentieth century and as a Nobel Prize winner, HP
was also a poet, actor, theatre director, and writer of radio plays and screenplays both original and adapted. He was early recognised for stage violence, for comedy of menace and theatre of the absurd. His work became more urgently political with time. He stripped the excess fat from theatre dialogue, and mapped out his own distinctive theatrical topography: a place haunted by the ambivalence of memory, flecked by uncertainty, reeking of sex, and echoing with a strange, mordant laughter.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
FW
joined distinguished writers such as Harold Pinter
in contributing to the multi-act Mixed Doubles: an Entertainment on Marriage, which was published in 1970 by Methuen
.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research.
14: 752
Newman, Jenny. “’See Me as Sisyphus, But Having A Good Time’: The Fiction of Fay Weldon”. Contemporary British Women Writers: Texts and Strategies, edited by Robert E. Hosmer, Macmillan.
207
When, however, in the...
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
By perverse coincidence, SW
began her novel about the bombing of London (whose title had been used by several other writers already) on the morning of 11 September 2001.
Allardice, Lisa. “Uncharted Waters”. The Guardian.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
She broke new ground here in...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Michelene Wandor
In its original form, says Greenhalgh, this book reflects MW
's roles as playwright, reviewer, and Leavisite
student of English literature.
Greenhalgh, Susanne. “A Review of <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender</span> by Michelene Wandor”. Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.
13
, No. 1, pp. 125-6.
125
The revised form considers the impact of feminism, socialism, and changing concepts of...
Textual Production
Dodie Smith
DS
found herself increasingly out of step with the new drama being produced in London since the advent of the Angry Young Men. She could tolerate John Osborne
and even admired Shelagh Delaney
...
Literary responses
Ann Quin
Berg earned AQ
two major awards: the Harkness Fellowship, given to the most promising Commonwealth artist under thirty years, and the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
WP
was touched and delighted when members of the National Theatre
audience (mostly white and relatively affluent) saw the likeness between their own parents and those on stage.
Stephenson, Heidi, and Natasha Langridge. Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. Methuen Drama.
Bennett, Ronan. “The Country Girl’s Home Truths”. Guardian Unlimited.
1
Textual Production
Penelope Mortimer
PM
finished this book in spring this year, and again dedicated it to her second husband, John Mortimer
.
Lord, Graham. John Mortimer, The Devil’s Advocate. The Unauthorised Biography. Orion.
104
It became a successful, award-winning film, with a script by Harold Pinter
and starring Anne Bancroft
Literary responses
Judith Kazantzis
Harold Pinter
called this work beautifully wrought, concrete, and passionate, and also noted that a major political poem was a rare event. Carol Ann Duffy
(herself an intensely political poet) observed sardonically: Someone should...
Reception
Sarah Kane
A propos the Sheffield production of 2015, Alan Bennett
commented on the difficulty of achieving realism with such extreme violence: how can a character mutilated on stage be shown as having attention for anything at...
Performance of text
James Joyce
This followed its rejection by managements in England, Ireland and America, the first pronounced by George Bernard Shaw
and the second by W. B. Yeats
.
O’Brien, Edna. “The ogre of betrayal”. The Guardian, pp. Review 10 - 11.
11
The first English-language production took place in New...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jane Howard
She took four years to write this novel, working with a new agent, A. D. Peters
. Having before this written fast and easily, she now reduced her speed to a crawl, with constant rewriting...
On 3 December her friends and family held a Frances Horovitz Memorial Celebration at the Young Vic Theatre. Harold Pinter
, Anne Stevenson
, Roger Garfitt
, Michael Horovitz
, and others read, sang, and performed her poetry.
Horovitz, Michael, and Frances Horovitz. A Celebration of and for Frances Horovitz (1938-1983). New Departures.
2
Timeline
December 1951: John Villiers Sankey began producing, on...
Writing climate item
December 1951
John Villiers Sankey
began producing, on a hand press housed in his bedroom, a little magazine called The Window, which he also edited.
