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.
Through her work on early French poetry LSC
became a friend of Sir Walter Scott
, who caused her to devote herself entirely to literature.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Both the original Dictionary of National Biography and its successor...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Smythies
In a critical preface HS
reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford
or Edward Bulwer Lytton
). The two groups of lovers and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
The book bears in various details the influence of Jane Austen
, though its overall project of pious didacticism is at odds with Austen's approach. The title-page quotes Rousseau
on the topic of the sensitive...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosa Nouchette Carey
One of the many novels which RNC
chose to dignify by quotations to head her chapters, this seems to make a particular attempt to impress. Those quoted imply considerable learning, even if (as seems likely)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Loudon
In prose the opening tale, Julia de Clifford, presents a well-meaning but thoughtless and impulsive heroine who progresses from dressing up as a ghost to scare the servants, to plunging her lover into despair...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Cuthbertson
Walter Scott
was hunting for a copy of this book in about 1813, calling it a now-forgotten novel;
Garside, Peter. “Walter Scott and the ’Common’ Novel, 1808-1819”. Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, Vol.
3
.
critic Peter Garside suspects that it exercised some influence on his Guy Mannering. Garside
calls...
Intertextuality and Influence
Louisa Anne Meredith
Most of the section called Poems, as well as some other pieces, describe flowers or other features of the natural world. Nature and poetry (which is celebrated in the opening Invocation to Song)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Loudon
This strikingly inventive and ingenious tale seems to owe a good deal to Mary Shelley
's Frankenstein (though Shelley receives no tribute in passing, as do R. B. Sheridan
, Byron
, and especially Scott
Fannie E. Ratchford
describes the Gondal that emerges from EB
's poems as a mountainous lake-dotted land inhabited by an Ossian-like race who loved and hated passionately, warred mysteriously, and died heroically.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. Gondal’s Queen, edited by Fannie E. Ratchford, University of Texas Press, pp. 11-38.
17
The...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Brontë
EB
's composition of her sole surviving novel, Wuthering Heights, flowed directly from her Gondal writings and shows much greater continuity with them than her sisters' fiction does. Like theirs, the novel reveals the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
The title-page quotes Burns
and Scott
. The preface remarks that books based on female impressions of national manners and moral character have succeeded in the past.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Sketches of the Present Manners, Customs, and Scenery of Scotland. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
prelims iv
The book is again made up...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruby M. Ayres
Like her later novels, Richard Chatterton, V.C. is a courtship novel ending happily in marriage. Published only a year into the First World War, it is also an examination, albeit a shallow one, of...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Eliot
As she moved on intellectually from her religious youth, she became steeped in the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and increasingly interested in alternative explanatory systems, particularly those of social science—including Herbert Spencer
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Spence's title-page bears a quotation from James Cririe
, a little-known Scots poet whom Burns had praised (and whom she cites several times later in her text). Perhaps for the sake of her original audience...