Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sir Walter Scott
-
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.
CIJ
published The Cook and Housewife's Manual under the pseudonym Margaret Dods, in honour of Walter Scott
's character from the Cleikum Inn in St. Ronan's Well.
Meg Dods from St. Ronan's Well...
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Amelia Opie
At about the same date she published several Recollections of an Authoress in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal. Each of these dealt with a particular author she had known, including Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
and Sir Walter Scott
.
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, p. xxxvii - lxx.
lv
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Anne Marsh
Her prefatory praise of Sir Walter Scott
for having made the English understand Scotland, and of Charles Lever
for only now beginning to make the English understand Ireland, has led careless readers to suppose that...
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Mary Bryan
MB
sent Scott
, in a letter, a poem entitled The Village Maid.
Ragaz, Sharon. “Writing to Sir Walter: The Letters of Mary Bryan Bedingfield”. Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, No. 7.
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Catherine Fanshawe
According to Sir Walter Scott
, CF
and her sisters were responsible for the first publication, in 1829, of the memoirs of their seventeenth-century ancestor Ann Fanshawe
. He described it as a new publishd...
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Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
collaborated with Sir Walter Scott
on his spoof, Private Letters of the Seventeenth Century. Printed in part in this year, it did not appear complete until the twentieth century, long after both Scott's...
Butler, Lady Eleanor et al. “Foreword and Editorial Materials”. The Hamwood Papers of the Ladies of Llangollen and Caroline Hamilton, edited by Eva Mary Bell, Macmillan, p. vii - viii; various pages.
MB
(now Bedingfield) accompanied her last surviving letter to Scott
with a poem entitled Return my Muse, which laments her final decline into blindness.
Ragaz, Sharon. “Writing to Sir Walter: The Letters of Mary Bryan Bedingfield”. Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, No. 7.
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Christian Isobel Johnstone
She published this anonymously. Another edition of the same year has the Edinburgh imprint only. She claims that the first half of the work was set up in print before she had seen Scott
's...
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Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
expressed decorous dismay when her friend Sir Walter Scott
made public her authorship of the comic and outspoken ballad Ugly Meg.
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Augusta Ada Byron
As an adolescent Ada composed an essay on Sir Walter Scott
's Heart of Midlothian, and a handful of creative tales.
Woolley, Benjamin. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter. Macmillan.
114
Later she composed an essay on the imagination.
Woolley, Benjamin. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter. Macmillan.
217
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Anna Gordon
Walter Scott
invited Robert Jamieson
for a visit during which they exchanged copies of ballads derived from two separate manuscripts of AG
's collection of ballads, bringing their joint stores to about fifty of her...
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Vita Sackville-West
By the following year she was writing: not only a diary, and soon an extensive correspondence, but also poetry (not about adolescent feelings but about places and historical characters); long, romantic, historical novels in the...
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Maria Edgeworth
ME
published three volumes of Tales of Fashionable Life, which Walter Scott
called a series of moral fictions.
McCormack, William John et al. “Introduction”. The Absentee, The World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, p. ix - xlvii.
xlvi
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Mary Bryan
MB
mentions in 1815 another work which she abandoned unfinished, on the grounds that some unnamed individuals might have had their feelings wounded by it.
Bryan, Mary, and Jonathan Wordsworth. Sonnets and Metrical Tales 1815. Woodstock Books.
99n
Soon afterwards, in 1818, she sent Sir Walter Scott
