Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Inchbald
-
Standard Name: Inchbald, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Simpson
Married Name: Elizabeth Inchbald
Pseudonym: Mrs Woodley
Nickname: Mrs Perfection
EI
was a diarist from her teens. Before and after her debut on as an actress on the London stage in 1780, she considered writing as a way to make a living. Before she had made any headway getting her first novel accepted, she became a prolific dramatist: she wrote or translated twenty-one plays (about half of them adaptations). Three major theatrical editing projects appeared under her name. In the early twenty-first century her reputation stands high both as novelist and dramatist.
Her version of La Perouse was refused a licence, on political grounds, by the censor John Larpent
(husband of Anna Margaretta Larpent
). The Natural Son, 1798, was her translation of Das Kind der...
Textual Production
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The importance of politics in ALB
's journalism is shown by her declining an invitation from Maria Edgeworth
in 1804 to associate herself with a journal written entirely by women, on the grounds that the...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Hamilton
EH
would clearly have been unable, for health reasons, to participate in the abortive Longman
's project reported by Catherine Hutton
very shortly before Hamilton died—a projected women's periodical, which was to bear EH
's...
Textual Production
Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Textual Production
Annie Tinsley
AT
, as the author of Margaret; or, Prejudice at Home, published a novel with a female first-person protagonist, Women as They Are. By One of Them.
The title of Women as They...
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Maria Edgeworth
ME
's early letters to her friend Fanny Robinson
are earnest and priggish. By the 1790s she was sending the Ruxtons letters which have literary merit in themselves (mixing amusing anecdote and expressions of affection)...
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Rose Tremain
RT
published a novel entitled Music and Silence, which she dedicated to her daughter, Eleanor.
Scholar John Mullan
has related the title to others employing two abstract nouns, like Elizabeth Inchbald
's Nature and...
Textual Production
Amelia Opie
AO
was an indefatigable letter-writer. Her surviving correspondence at the Huntington Library
includes 331 letters (1794-1850). Most are written by her to her cousin Eliza (Alderson) Briggs
or her husband; a few are from her...
Textual Production
Eglinton Wallace
It was (as the title-page acknowledged) based on a French original, Guerre ouverte, ou ruse contre ruse, by Antoine-Jean Bourlin
, who used the pseudonym Dumaniant. Elizabeth Inchbald
translated the same play under...
Textual Production
Maria Edgeworth
The Longman
's project reported by Catherine Hutton
on 13 June this year, for a women's periodical bearing the names of ME
, BarbauldInchbald
, and Hamilton
, seems not to have materialised. It...
In this humorous poem the author draws on her first-hand knowledge, as an actor and singer, with the London stage. She marshals thirty-four of it actors and writers to appear before Apollo, who metes out...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
It is not clear how much of Bellamy's completed novel ESG
actually wrote: as much as the whole of volume three may be hers. Her preface echoes Samuel Johnson
when it says the history of...
