Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Ruth Rendell
-
Standard Name: Rendell, Ruth
Birth Name: Ruth Barbara Graseman
Married Name: Ruth Barbara Rendell
Titled: Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh
Pseudonym: Barbara Vine
RR
established herself as a leading crime novelist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To the intricacies of plot characteristic of the genre, she adds a capacity to scare her readers, and a sophisticated focus on the psychological and emotional aspects of criminal minds and the minds of those committed to the notion of justice. She is also attentive to contemporary English life and keenly interested in books and language, which feature importantly in her fictional worlds. She published sixty novels and was translated into twenty-five languages.
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JW
published a novel titled The Gap in Time. The Winter's Tale Retold: first in the Hogarth Shakespeare series in which novelists are commissioned to retell a Shakespearean
plot. She dedicated it to the...
Friends, Associates
Jeanette Winterson
JW
is a close friend of crime writer Ruth Rendell
, from whom she borrows a cottage in Essex every autumn to go and spend time writing. Other friends speak of JW
as a person...
Intertextuality and Influence
Josephine Tey
Later crime writer Val McDermid
discovered this novel, her first by Tey, as a revelation: modern, nuanced, unformulaic, it was unlike its contemporaries but in tune with some successors, like Patricia Highsmith
and Ruth Rendell
Intertextuality and Influence
Josephine Tey
Ruth Rendell
uses it as a point of reference in her crime novel Harm Done, 1999. Her investigator, Wexford, suggests to a confident young woman claiming to have been kidnapped that she in turn...
Literary responses
Pat Barker
Another World was praised by several of PB
's fellow-novelists. Ruth Rendell
thought it the most moving thing Barker had ever done; P. D. James
called it subtle and beautifully written; Michele Roberts
found...
Literary responses
Anita Brookner
Ruth Rendell
thought this AB
's best novel to date, and Susan Hill
thought it her best since Hotel du Lac. Rendell called it almost unbearably moving; Hill said it marks an advance...
Literary responses
Sue Townsend
Ruth Rendell
called this book the funniest thing in print since Adrian Mole.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Textual Features
Antonia Fraser
In her detective-story guise, Fraser sees herself as part of a women's tradition in the genre, and names as influences a number of writers who are known for interest in human psychology and a high...
Textual Features
P. D. James
The result, as Ashby noted, falls somewhere between the cosy settings of Agatha Christie
's Miss Marples novels and the gritty urban dystopias of contemporaries like Ruth Rendell
. PDJ
's imagined worlds tend to...
Textual Production
Anne Finch
One passage from a long Pindaric ode entitled All is Vanity (present in Finch's early octavo ms and in her printed collection) has broken loose and achieved a life of its own. Whereas the entire...
Textual Production
Joanna Trollope
Other contributors to the collection included Ruth Rendell
, Maeve Binchy
, and Richard Branson
. Several companies gave their services without payment for the production of these books, aimed at beginning readers or hesitant readers.
According to her own story, Elizabeth Canning
, a maidservant, was abducted, after which she was imprisoned for days.
9 March 1950
Timothy Evans
, a van-driver in his early twenties, was hanged for the murders of his wife and baby daughter, who were more likely killed by the family's landlord, John Reginald Halliday Christie
.