This novel also takes up contemporary debates over race and nation in relation to the figure of Olive herself; the language of racial description permeates the novel's depiction of her English mother and her Scottish...
Literary responses
Dinah Mulock Craik
Elaine Showalter
initiated feminist interest in DMC
, first with a substantial article and then with treatment of her as a paradigmatic feminine novelist who promoted domesticity as a defensive strategy.
Showalter, Elaine. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship”. Feminist Studies, Vol.
2
, pp. 5-23.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press.
85-6
Cora Kaplan
...
Literary responses
Felicia Hemans
FH
was slow to register on the radar of recuperative feminist critics. Cora Kaplan
was an early exception in her anthology Salt and Bitter and Good, 1975.Margaret Homans
in her early attempt to...
Reception
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB
's reputation fell sharply after the turn of the century. Virginia Woolf
wittily remarked in the 1930s: fate has not been kind to Mrs Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her...
Reception
Sarah Waters
SW
calls this book on the one hand a homage to the sensation novels of Braddon
and Wilkie Collins
, on the other hand a reflection of 1990s excitement over the concept of queer. Writing...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The volume revolves around the events in Italy surrounding Napoleon III
's betrayal, in the treaty of Villafranca in July 1859, of allies in the Italian nationalist cause against Austria, but earlier poems are also...
Textual Features
Dinah Mulock Craik
This was the first novel of DMC
's in which the motif of disability—her predilection for cripples and invalids
Showalter, Elaine. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship”. Feminist Studies, Vol.
2
, pp. 5-23.
11
as Henry James
patronisingly called it in 1866—appeared. According to critic Cora Kaplan
, this...
Textual Features
Hannah Cullwick
HC
plays up the Victorian obsession with dirt regularly, often noting that she prepared meals in [her] dirt
Cullwick, Hannah. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant. Editor Stanley, Liz, Rutgers University Press.
69, 116
or that she went to bed too exhausted to clean up. She represents herself as...
In dedications she thanks her daughter Cassie for the idea of the dog and her sister Robyn
for the idea of the laudanum addiction.
Slovo, Gillian. An Honourable Man. Virago Press.
prelims
Among the first outside readers she thanks are Cora Kaplan
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jeni Couzyn
JC
's introduction is a succinct and sharply intelligent historical sketch of women's poetry in English and the forces arrayed against it. She begins with the Gaelic oral tradition of the Scottish Highlands as represented...
Timeline
May 1975: Cora Kaplan edited the first modern anthology...
Women writers item
May 1975
Cora Kaplan
edited the first modern anthology of women's poetry in Britain: Salt and Bitter and Good: three centuries of English and American women poets, published by Paddington Press
.
January 1979: The Feminist Review, an academic and theoretical...
Writing climate item
January 1979
The Feminist Review, an academic and theoretical journal, began publication in London.
By mid-October 1983: Ursula Owen, editor of Virago Press, published...
Women writers item
By mid-October 1983
Ursula Owen
, editor of Virago Press
, published with them an anthology of essays: Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.
Texts
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Cora Kaplan. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Women’s Press, 1978.
Kaplan, Cora, and Dinah Mulock Craik. “Introduction”. Olive; and, The Half-Caste, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. ix - xxv.
Craik, Dinah Mulock, and Cora Kaplan. Olive; and, The Half-Caste. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Kaplan, Cora. “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism”. Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, Methuen, 1985, pp. 146-76.
Kaplan, Cora. Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets. Paddington Press, 1975.
