Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Emily Brontë
-
Standard Name: Brontë, Emily
Birth Name: Emily Brontë
Pseudonym: Ellis Bell
Used Form: Emily Bronte
Used Form: Two
Emily Brontë
collaborated with her siblings on a body of juvenilia, and by herself wrote a small number of poems and a single surviving novel. Wuthering Heights is established as one of the most original and disturbing novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Its compelling imagery, sophisticated narrative technique, and powerful, indeed violent, story—part ghost story, part romance, part anatomy of social hierarchies and cultural conflict—details the enmity between two families on the Yorkshire moors that erupts when a strange child is adopted into one of them, and which is only resolved in the subsequent generation.
ML
defines ecstasy as experiences that are joyful, transitory, unexpected, rare, valued, and extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source.
Laski, Marghanita. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences. Cresset Press.
5
An ecstatic state is one in which...
Textual Production
Bryony Lavery
BL
's numerous plays for radio include some original and some adapted from other works: Laying Ghosts, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Velma and Therese (a parallel version of the film Thelma and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Q. D. Leavis
Responding to recent charges that Brontë
's novel is stylistically flawed, incoherent in intention, and excessively melodramatic and violent, QDL
argues that the text, although not a seamless work of art, belongs, along with Tolstoy
Family and Intimate relationships
Vernon Lee
The women's relationship began with (and was sustained by) their shared love of literature. Mary dedicated some poems in her A Handful of Honeysuckle to Violet, and regularly stayed with her in Italy, as...
Residence
Anne Lister
For the rest of her life AL
lived at fifteenth-century Shibden Hall.
Shibden Hall is now a folk museum.
Nicholls, C. S., editor. The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons. Oxford University Press.
Halifax, the urban centre of AL
's life, is about twelve miles from Haworth...
Textual Features
Liz Lochhead
Beginning with a rap'bout being a woman,
Lochhead, Liz. True Confessions and New Clichés. Polygon Books.
3
the revue explores many facets of a woman's life, from her dramas, her traumas, and her fiascos to her fainting spasms; / the ins-and-outs of her...
Literary responses
Hannah Lynch
Blackwood's Magazine introduced the serialization of this book with a half-promise of its being a clef: It is, we believe, the faithful narrative of an actual experience, the work of a powerful writer whose identity...
Education
Flora Macdonald Mayor
Although FMM
's father was, for the most part, more concerned with her fragile health than her academic development, the twin sisters received some home-schooling from their mother to quite a high level, since she...
Education
Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters
, Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield
and Gertrude Stein
. Isak Dinesen
was to come later.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
808
Publishing
Charlotte Mew
The Poems of Emily Brontë, CM
's article reclaiming the neglected poems of that great genius,
Mew, Charlotte. Collected Poems and Prose. Editor Warner, Val, Carcanet and Virago.
356
was published in Temple Bar.
Mew, Charlotte. “Introduction”. Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Carcanet and Virago, p. ix - xxii.
Many of the essays reprinted here focus on women writers who were, to put it mildly, little known to the public in the 1940s. These included: Anna Seward
and Joanna Baillie
, as well as...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
LMM
attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College
in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edith Mary Moore
The title-page quotes from Shakespeare
(What's past is Prologue) and Cicero
(That cannot be said too often which is not yet understood).
Moore, Edith Mary. The Defeat of Woman. C.W. Daniel Co.
