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.
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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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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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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Flora Thompson
The origin of the title has not been established: it may have come from Sir Walter Scott
's Peveril of the Peak, or from any one of the several place-names in which this element...
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Grace Aguilar
GA
's early historical romance in the style of Scott
, The Days of Bruce, was published posthumously by her mother
.
Galchinsky, Michael. The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer. Wayne State University Press.
139
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press.
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Emily Gerard
At eleven or twelve EG
began to scribble in secret—poetry of course; for what youthful writer at that stage of his or her existence would stoop to prose! Most of her poems were elegies on...
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Mary Bryan
Letters exchanged between MB
and Sir Walter Scott
survive for these years; the correspondence, however, may not have ended in 1827.
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
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...
