Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Margaret Atwood
Standard Name: Atwood, Margaret
Birth Name: Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Nickname: Peggy Atwood
Indexed Name: M. E. Atwood
Well before the end of the twentieth century MA
had become one of Canada's leading writers in multiple genres. She now writes for a global audience who read her more than forty novels , poetry,short stories, criticism, lectures, editing of anthologies, and experiments with new, mixed, and digital genres.
SM
is best remembered for her first-person narrative of pioneer life in Canada, Roughing It in the Bush, 1852, considered a foundational work of Canadian literature. She was a prolific author who wrote...
Publishing
A. S. Byatt
She thought of the title and the central idea for the novel in the British Library, watching that great Coleridge
scholar, Kathleen Coburn
, and thinking of the poet possessing his critic, and of the...
Reception
Margaret Forster
In a National Women's Register
poll of members to determine the best woman writer of the twentieth century, MF
came third with twenty-one votes, just behind Margaret Atwood
with twenty-five and just ahead of Enid Blyton
Reception
Alice Munro
More than her previous collection, this volume established AM
's reputation. In Britain she was hailed by Julian Symons
as interesting . . . remarkable, and (along with Margaret Atwood
) as distinctly Canadian...
Reception
Carol Shields
Its author called this a feel-good book.
Wachtel, Eleanor, editor. “Carol Shields”. More Writers and Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel, Vintage Canada, pp. 36-56.
56
According to Margaret Atwood
it sold particularly well in Britain, boosting Shields's international status.
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, p. 28.
28
Reception
Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson
, centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Modern Poetry Association,. Poetry. http://www.poetrymagazine.org.
Textual Features
Nawal El Saadawi
The Imam rules and tyrannizes over an imaginary island. The rebellious heroine, Bint Allah (which means daughter of God), appears to have been illegitimately fathered by the Imam, and while it seems appropriate to...
Textual Features
Susanna Moodie
Another personal narrative, but with less of the autobiographical in it than its predecessor, this book takes its structure from the succession of places passed through and people met on a recent trip to Niagara...
Textual Features
Fay Weldon
FW
has summarised the topics of The Fat Woman's Joke as food, fatness, sex and housework, which, she says, made it revolutionary in its day, though by the early twenty-first century these topics had become...
Textual Features
Germaine Greer
The selection of poets is highly informed. It reaches back in time before GG
's anthology Kissing the Rod, to Anne Askew
and Isabella Whitney
, and forward to Carol Ann Duffy
and Margaret Atwood
Textual Features
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 Production
Angela Carter
In mid-career AC
said she had worked mainly with women as her publishers' editors. Shared gender makes a difference in this relationship, she wrote, even if the reader has zero feminist consciousness.
Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, pp. 69-77.
72
Her two...
Textual Production
Gillian Clarke
GC
has contributed poems to more than half a dozen journals, Welsh, English, and American, and most frequently to Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, and Poetry Nation Review (PNR). She has reviewed...
Textual Production
Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS
has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Atwood, Margaret. The Heart Goes Last. Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2015.
Atwood, Margaret. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Oxford University Press, 1970.
Atwood, Margaret, and Charles Pachter. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Macfarlane, Walter, and Ross, 1997.
Atwood, Margaret, editor. The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Canongate, 2005.
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Vintage Canada, 2006.
Atwood, Margaret. “The road to Ustopia”. Guardian Weekly, pp. 25-7.
Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride. McClelland and Stewart, 1993.
Atwood, Margaret. The Tent. McClelland and Stewart, 2006.
Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. McClelland and Stewart, 2009.
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, p. 28.
Atwood, Margaret. Two-Headed Poems. Oxford University Press, 1978.
Atwood, Margaret. “Ursula K Le Guin . . . ’One of the literary greats of the 20th century’”. theguardian.com.
Atwood, Margaret. “What ’The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump”. The New York Review of Books.
Atwood, Margaret, and Naomi Alderman. “Why we’re co-writing a zombie novel”. theguardian.com.
Atwood, Margaret. Wilderness Tips. McClelland and Stewart, 1991.
