Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Emily Brontë
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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.
The Times Literary Supplement reviewed this novel harshly. It judged the story fairly dull and pointless, and took issue with Jill's girlish narrative tone: Miss Wilson's slangy unsophistication is not simplicity; it is merely an...
Literary responses
Marjorie Bowen
Although MB
was commended for the accuracy of her historical settings in her crime novels, Mary Jean deMarr
points out that she was also faulted for unbelievable reversals and obstrusive symbolism. However, deMarr finds 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.
prelims
The chapters run from Women and the Struggle...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Bridge
At about twelve Mary Anne Sanders (later AB
) was meeting eminent scholars at dinner, because her businessman father, who had to leave the house early in the morning, insisted against convention on even his...
The title of this novel comes from O'Brien's four-line epigraph from Emily Brontë
, where the phrase rhymes with Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers.
O’Brien, Edna. Wild Decembers. Houghton Mifflin.
prelims
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Among our contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich
has offered this reading of ED
's life and works: Emily Dickinson—viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as partially cracked, by the twentieth century as fey or...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Gardam
Again the story centres on a girl growing up, though some attention is given too to her younger siblings, Sebastian and Phoebe (known from her pebble glasses as Beams). It is their father, the Reverend...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. S. Byatt
Charlotte Brontë
's poem We wove a web in childhood appears as epigraph, along with a sentence from Coleridge
about the serpent as emblem of the imagination.
Byatt, A. S. The Game. Chatto and Windus.
4
Both web and serpent are ominous. This...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Because of the extent to which ED
's concentrated and elusive verse, as well as her dissent from religious and social orthodoxies, seem to presage modernism, she has been considered the sole serious writer among...
Intertextuality and Influence
Daphne Du Maurier
She wrote this novel during the previous winter at her parents' country house, Ferryside at Bodinnick in Cornwall.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
While she worked at it, some lines from an Emily Brontë
poem (Self-Interrogation) came...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
SG
's characters are amusing caricatures of socialites, intellectuals, and rustics. Flora's city friend, the modern young widow Mrs Smiling, for instance, has a large collection of suitors and an even larger collection of brassières...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
As a child SW
loved writing poems and stories, all entirely derivative from her reading of popular books like the Dr Who novelizations. In the sixth form at school she began to find the study...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Carson
The contents of this book include some that have become central to the Carson canon, like The Glass Essay, a poem of love and desire, loss and rejection, whose speaker survives the end of...
