Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Queen Elizabeth I
-
Standard Name: Elizabeth I, Queen
Birth Name: Elizabeth Tudor
Royal Name: Elizabeth I
QEI
was a scholar by training and inclination (who wrote translations both as learning exercises and for recreation), as well as a writer in many genres and several languages. As monarch she wrote speeches, and all her life she wrote letters, poems, and prayers. (Some of these categories occasionally overlap.) Once her writing moved beyond the dutifulness of her youth, she had a pungent and forceful style both in prose and poetry.
In her Elegy Upon . . . Sidney, In Honour of Du Bartas, and In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory, AB
pays measured and solemn...
Textual Features
Mary Ann Cavendish Bradshaw
The novel consists largely of the personal histories of its (good) central characters, told severally in flashback. Maria's relates, with documents, how her father died young, leaving her co-heiress with her sister, while her violent-tempered...
Literary Setting
Mary Ann Cavendish Bradshaw
Each title-page proclaims: If the cap fits, wear it—perhaps acknowledging the à clef element of the story.
Bradshaw, Mary Ann Cavendish. Memoirs of Maria, Countess d’Alva. William Miller.
1: title-page
This melodramatic, romantic farrago, confused in chronology and inflated in style, is set during the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Boyd
EB
endorses Haddock
's blockade of Spain. She opens on England's greatness in the days When Great Eliza
fill'd the British Throne; she praises Elizabeth for her decision not to marry Philip of Spain
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Enid Blyton
It was made of the same mix as Sunny Stories: a letter from the editor, nature notes, stories, strip cartoons, serials, puzzles and competitions, letters from child readers, and the organisation of fund-raising for...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
turned to history in her next biography, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I
.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
25: 273
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Despite her subject, EOB
refrains from demonizing Queen Elizabeth
. She goes into great detail about the cultural milieu in which Mary grew up (the sixteenth-century French court) and uses unpublished letters to add depth...
Textual Features
Simone de Beauvoir
SB
produces a treatise rather than a polemic, using a studied moderation of tone. She deploys an artful range of styles and her material is drawn from biology, history, sociology, economics, and in a large...
Education
Mary Basset
Mary Roper (later MB
) was taught as a child to read Greek and Latin. Her mother tried to get Roger Ascham
to teach her, but found him unwilling to leave Cambridge University. (He did...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Bacon
AB
bore her younger son, Francis
, who became an influential scientist, writer, and thinker, as well as Lord Chancellor of England, and Viscount St Albans.
The early-twentieth-century Baconian movement (a group of scholars and...
politics
Anne Bacon
In spite of her Puritan convictions AB
pledged her allegiance without delay to the Catholic Queen Mary
and was later a gentlewoman of the privy chamber. She thus benefited the male members of her family...
Occupation
Anne Bacon
Some years after Elizabeth
came to the throne, AB
entertained the queen at Gorhambury. She was also an active patron of young Puritan
clergymen and a protector of those whose radical beliefs made them suspect...
Textual Production
Marie-Catherine d' Aulnoy
MCA
made what seems to be her first appearance in English, with The Novels of Elizabeth Queen of England
, Containing the history of Queen Ann of Bullen (which represented a part of her Nouvelles...
Textual Features
Penelope Aubin
PA
celebrates recent military victories, and praises Anne
for completing Queen Elizabeth
's work in assuring the strength of the Church of England
. She provides lavish panegyric for every Stuart monarch, as her ravish'd...