Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
-
Standard Name: Spence, Elizabeth Isabella
Indexed Name: Miss Spence
Pseudonym: A Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of Summer Excursions . . . .
EIS
began publishing just before the end of the eighteenth century and continued for twenty-five years. She issued novels, shorter fiction, and travel books, the latter put together from letters sent to friends in the course of summer excursions around England, Wales, and Scotland (her native country). Her fiction sometimes draws on anecdotes from life, both recent and historical or pseudo-historical. As an author she is not distinguished, but her interest in circulating information about other women writers gives her some significance for women's literary history.
CM
was visited at her home by the novelist and travel-writer Elizabeth Isabella Spence
(who was Scots-born though living in England, and who took a great interest both in her life-story and in her poetry).
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
52
Family and Intimate relationships
Christian Milne
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
later called him a common carpenter.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
56
In the course of his sea voyages he was twice captured by the Americans, and lost his clothes and the wages due to him.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
62
Friends, Associates
Jane Porter
The Porters' mother lived a busy social life on limited means, and JP
kept up this tradition. Sir Walter Scott
was an early friend.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
265
When she moved to London, JP
included among her friends...
Health
Ann Radcliffe
Rictor Norton believes that AR
may have suffered a nervous breakdown in 1803, after finishing Gaston de Blondeville, and another in late 1812, after the publishing of Anna Seward
's letters alleging that she...
Literary responses
Mary Robinson
On her deathbed MR
regretted that most of her works had been composed in too much haste,
Robinson, Mary. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Editor Levy, Moses Joseph, Peter Owen.
151
and declared that if, against all expectation, she should survive, she would begin a new long work...
Friends, Associates
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
Their mother was living in Paris at this time, and Rosina lived in London with her uncle Sir John Doyle
(latterly without her sister, who joined their mother in Paris). She reputedly had an unusual...
Textual Features
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
MAS
adds a new aesthetic category, the contemplative sublime, alongside the Burke
an or terrible sublime and other categories related to the Burkean beautiful. She derives her thinking from women as well as men. In...
Literary responses
Ann Yearsley
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
, reporting on a visit to Bristol, mentions AY
as an example of an obscure woman writer of genius.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
71
In 1990 Donna Landry
wrote of her complex contradictions under the heading...
