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.
Will Shakespeare is written in blank verse, but does not imitate Elizabethan language. Subtitled an invention, the play dramatises Shakespeare
's early career as a writer, focusing on his move from Stratford to London...
Textual Features
Amelia Opie
Both in an Address to the Editor and in a series of explanatory footnotes, AO
positions herself on the one hand as a historian with a proper regard for available evidence, and on the other...
The first two volumes carried the story from Queen Elizabeth
's death to 1641.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press.
26
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...
Textual Features
Elinor James
James's strong admonitory style has much in common with that of religious prophets. She is equally ready to cross swords with Quakers and Dissenters on the one hand and Catholics on the other, to venerate...
Textual Features
Anne Grant
Leaving these images of militarism and turning back to Britain with Princess Charlotte
in mind, AGcast[s] a forward glance to hope again / Protracted blessings in a female reign,
Grant, Anne. Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown; J. Ballantyne.
48
looking to Charlotte to...
Textual Features
Hilary Mantel
She is interested in hidden history, in apparently negligible people or objects whose historical significance is apparent only with hindsight, like the ginger-haired baby who would one day be known as Queen Elizabeth
or the...
Textual Features
Sally Purcell
On a Cenotaph quotes a phrase from Baudelaire
's poem Lesbos: the shocking juxtaposition of a dead body with adoration in le cadavre adoré di Sapho
. Though SP
supplied notes to some things...
Textual Features
Charlotte Smith
In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia...
Textual Features
Maureen Duffy
While the present-day plot produces a series of surreal confrontations, it is punctuated by a string of glimpses into the past. These begin when Swanscombe Man (the prehistoric human whose bones are the earliest evidence...
Textual Features
Liz Lochhead
Mary makes Lochhead's usual exuberant use of Scottish English. LL
based Queen Elizabeth
's character on Margaret Thatcher
(the Thatcher monster).
Varty, Anne. “The Mirror and the Vamp: Liz Lochhead”. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 641-58.
651
In contrast to this topicality, as critic Anne Varty
observes, her Queen...
Textual Features
Harriet Smythies
Towards the end of this poem about the Crimean War, HS
calls on the women of England. She regards them as formed with gentle hands / To minister to suffering,
Smythies, Harriet. Sebastopol.
19
but she nevertheless...
Textual Features
Amelia B. Edwards
ABE
seizes the attention of her audience from her first paragraph with her claim that to the surprise of scholars, ancient Egyptian woman turns out to have been always free, respected, and in the full...
Textual Features
Katherine Chidley
The title exhorts him to begin the new yeare, with new fruits of love, first to God, and then to his brethren.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
The Introduction or Epistle, To the Godly Reader explains why she has taken...
