Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Amelia B. Edwards
-
Standard Name: Edwards, Amelia B.
Birth Name: Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards
Indexed Name: Amelia B. Edwards
Indexed Name: Amelia Blandford Edwards
Pseudonym: The Author of Barbara's History
ABE
sustained a moderately successful authorial career, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when she made the choice of writing as a profession—something she needed in order to earn a living. She was a periodical contributor (of stories, articles, and reviews of books and of art) and novelist, who also produced biography, translation, songs, anthologies, and travel literature. Her twenty or so novels were popular: their characters and situations are drawn with a broad brush and reflect in slightly cruder form the more fruitful innovations of the most original novelists of her day. She is best remembered, however, for her work in Egyptology. Her books on Egyptian subjects overlap on one side with her travel writing and on the other with her lecturing; she is still regarded as a founder of the discipline.
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Amelia B. Edwards
, cousin of MBE
, became known as a novelist, travel-writer, and Egyptologist.
Miles, Alfred H. The Victorian Poets: The Bio-Critical Introductions to the Victorian Poets from A. H. Miles’s The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. Fredeman, William E.Editor , Garland, 1986.
385
Black, Helen C. Notable Women Authors of the Day. D. Bryce, 1893.
127
Matilda got to know her well while serving as a governess-pupil at Mimosa House in Peckham...
Friends, Associates
Matilda Betham-Edwards
An early literary acquaintance of MBE
was the playwright Joseph Stirling Coyne
(known as Sterling Coyne), whom she met through her cousin Amelia B. Edwards
.
Betham-Edwards, Matilda. Reminiscences. G. Redway, 1898, p. vi, 354 pp.
She also rejected the patronage of a wealthy Englishwoman from whom her cousin and friend Amelia B. Edwards
received help.
Betham-Edwards, Matilda. Reminiscences. G. Redway, 1898, p. vi, 354 pp.
179
Friends, Associates
May Crommelin
MC
's only mentors during her early years as a novelist, whom she consulted mainly by post, were Lord Dufferin (a neighbouring landowner and talented travel writer, as well an imperial statesman), the established writer...
She was not the only one to find inspiration for writing in her court experience. In addition to widespread newspaper coverage and several reports of the trials themselves, other creative responses continued to appear. J. R. O'Flanagan
Reception
Frances Power Cobbe
FPC
's importance to her contemporaries is most readily recalled today by the fact that Matthew Arnold
thought her a worthy target of his corrective wisdom in The Function of Criticism at the Present Time...
Reception
Edith J. Simcox
Susanne Stark
, evaluating Primitive Civilizations in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, credits EJS
with launching a substantial attack on conventional Victorian society: by alerting her readers to the fact that the prosperity...
Textual Production
Matilda Betham-Edwards
During the final decade of the century MBE
remained as productive as ever. She published two novels in 1891 (A North-Country Comedy and A Romance of the Wine), besides a volume of stories,...
Textual Production
Eliza Cook
This was priced at only a penny halfpenny, to attract popular readership.
Gleadle, Kathryn. The Early Feminists. Macmillan, 1995.
91
It enjoyed circulation figures of 50,000 to 60,000—slightly higher than those of Dickens's Household Words—even though that was only a fraction...
After her time as a governess-pupil MBE
stayed for an extended period (not her first visit) with her cousin Amelia Edwards
in London.
Betham-Edwards, Matilda. Reminiscences. G. Redway, 1898, p. vi, 354 pp.
128, 130
Timeline
1860s
During this decade, annuals became associated with ghost stories, exemplified in works by Amelia B. Edwards
and Charlotte Riddell
.
July 1889
Women's Suffrage: A Reply appeared in the Fortnightly Review to counter Mary Augusta Ward
's Appeal Against Female Suffrage in the previous month's Nineteenth Century.