Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Shelley
-
Standard Name: Shelley, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
Married Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Pseudonym: Mary S.
Pseudonym: Mrs Caroline Barnard
MS
, long known almost exclusively for Frankenstein, is now being read for her later novels and her plays, as well as for her journals and letters. Her editing, reviewing, biographical, and journalistic work entitle her to the designation woman of letters. She is an important figure among women Romantics, and a channel for the reformist ideals of the 1790s forwards into the Victorian era.
With this play, Jellicoe deliberately broke with her earlier work by writing a narrative drama based on a pre-existing story. She was attracted to the subject of Percy Shelley's life
because it gave her the...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Mary...
Textual Features
Sophia King
This novel about the genesis of evil is told in the first person by its wicked yet pitiable male narrator, presented as a man of strong intellect and strong feeling, whose first words are What...
Occupation
Fanny Aikin Kortright
At her father's death it became necessary for FAK
and her unmarried sisters to find work, and they all became governesses. Her first job was at Bradford in Yorkshire, in the family of an...
Friends, Associates
Mary Lamb
Friends were still being added to the Lambs' circle late in their lives, including literary friends like John Clare
and Thomas Hood
. Charles corresponded with Mary Shelley
; ML
corresponded with Mary Matilda Betham
Intertextuality and Influence
Amy Levy
The plot concerns an English governess to an Italian family in Rome, who opposes the love which develops between her and the grown-up son. AL
plants allusions to Jane Eyre and to famous English...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Liz Lochhead
The title poem meditates on Mary Shelley
's creation of her novel Frankenstein (Eyes on those high peaks / . . . [she] sat down to quill and ink / and icy paper)...
Performance of text
Liz Lochhead
Lochhead has reworked this play (about Mary Shelley
's creation of Frankenstein) several times. A revised version was performed at the EdinburghFringe Festival
by the Traverse Theatre Club
under the new title Blood...
Intertextuality and Influence
Liz Lochhead
In considering the question of why Mary Shelley
created monsters, LL
says she was haunted by that phrase from Goya
: The sleep of reason produces monsters. If you try to force things to be...
Textual Features
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
Literary responses
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
This book sparked both sensation and controversy. It was the starting point for Blessington's friendships with Isaac D'Israeli
and Edward Bulwer-Lytton
.
Feldman, Paula R., editor. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. John Hopkins University Press.
149
Some critics were sceptical as to whether her friendship with Byron had...
Intertextuality and Influence
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...
Friends, Associates
Alice Meynell
Following her early conquest of Tennyson
, AM
went on to develop a large circle of literary acquaintances. Callers on the Meynells at Palace Court included Irish writer Katharine Tynan
, Aubrey Beardsley
(while he...
Textual Production
Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Textual Features
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...