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.
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
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
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...
Health
Margiad Evans
As a child of about three she had terrible nightmares about people (nuns) who were running away from something, on fire and dying. She had dreadful dreams again at about seventeen, and then a recurrent...
Health
Storm Jameson
SJ
's demanding work, travel, and personal commitments exacted a serious toll on her health. She contracted diphtheria as a young woman, probably when she nursed her son through it. Frequently exhausted, she also had...
Health
Dora Carrington
Carrington attempted to give herself a miscarriage by riding a horse violently, and when this did not work she became depressed to a nearly suicidal degree.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. John Murray.
Mary's descriptions of life abroad provided Charlotte Brontë
with what she described as a wish for wings,
Taylor, Mary. Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Brontë: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere. Editor Stevens, Joan, Auckland University Press; Oxford University Press.
22
and MT
successfully urged her and her sister Emily
to pursue their studies in Brussels; they...
Family and Intimate relationships
Emma Frances Brooke
It appears that EFB
had at least two sisters, and that they may have both been writers. An article written after EFB revealed her authorship of A Superfluous Woman quotes her still undiscovered biographer: There...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dora Sigerson
She had met him through Katharine Tynan, and they became engaged in September 1895 after a long courtship. Their loving marriage lasted the rest of Dora's life. They never had children.
