Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sir Walter Scott
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Standard Name: Scott, Sir Walter
Birth Name: Walter Scott
Titled: Sir Walter Scott
Nickname: The Great Unknown
Used Form: author of Kenilworth
The remarkable career of Walter Scott
began with a period as a Romantic poet (the leading Romantic poet in terms of popularity) before he went on to achieve even greater popularity as a novelist, particularly for his historical fiction and Scottish national tales. His well-earned fame in both these genres of fiction has tended to create the impression that he originated them, whereas in fact women novelists had preceded him in each.
CO
published her final biography, The Wizard of the North, The Life of Sir Walter Scott.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production
Joanna Baillie
JB
composed, at Hampstead, Lines on the Death of Sir Walter Scott.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
1: 478
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Lydia Maria Child
The story of her researching this book at the Boston Athenæum
is not quite accurate, since few of her borrowings from that institution were on the topic of slavery.
Clifford, Deborah Pickman. Crusader for Freedom. Beacon Press.
99
Her preface declares that a...
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Lady Anne Barnard
The words were printed anonymously in the second edition of Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, edited by David Herd
, 1776. LAB
did not admit her authorship until 1823, when she confided her secret...
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Mary Russell Mitford
As early as 1824 MRM
was asking the advice of friends as to whether they thought she could be a novelist.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 29
She added one of her frequent disclaimers: I write merely for remuneration...
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George Eliot
Many early extant letters of GE
's date from her unhappy, adolescent, Evangelical period, and have a tone of self-righteousness and censoriousness of others and of herself which is not pleasant to modern readers. In...
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Anna Seward
AS
, Poetical Works, was posthumously published, edited at her express desire by Walter Scott
(at this date a famous poet but not yet a novelist).
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
3d ser. 20 (1810): 448
Textual Production
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
In an AdvertisementEIS
claimed that she wrote this book before the appearance (in 1826) of two other historical novels about the Civil War period, Brambletye House by Horace Smith
and Woodstock by Sir Walter Scott
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Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
Some time after July 1814 SSW
published, bearing all three of her names, Waverley; or, The Castle of Mac Iver: A Highland Tale, of sixty years since. The title-page explained that this work was...
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Mary Brunton
She had nearly finished that part of the novel set in Scotland when in July that year Walter Scott
published Waverley. At first she thought she had better cancel her own Scottish scenes, but...
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Anna Seward
AS
wrote her first surviving letter to the young Walter Scott
, with a detailed critique of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, of which he had sent her the first volume (not the...
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Joanna Baillie
She agreed to do this without payment, though Thomson gave her an Indian shawl when adding to his first request six years later.
Baillie, Joanna. “Introduction”. The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie, 1762-1851, edited by Jennifer Breen, Manchester University Press, pp. 1-25.
9, 11
Baillie at first demurred, claiming that her talents did not...
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Sarah Stickney Ellis
In her preface to the poem she outlines theories of poetry, taking much the same approach towards it that she had towards fiction: that verse, like prose, would benefit from attention to simple, everyday life...
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Anna Seward
AS
's six-volume Letters . . . written between the years 1784 and 1807 were posthumously published: not edited by Scott
(as she had requested).
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
3d ser. 23 (1811): 112
Textual Features
Sarah Green
The plot owes something to Charlotte Lennox
's Female Quixote. The father of Green's heroine has lived through many crazes for novelists: first Burney
, then Radcliffe
, then Owenson
, then Rosa Matilda
