Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Oscar Wilde
-
Standard Name: Wilde, Oscar
Birth Name: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
OW
's significance as poet, playwright, and writer of prose fiction, remained in eclipse for many years after his notorious trial and imprisonment in Reading Gaol
, events whose chilling impact on poetry and prose in England was not reversed until the modernists returned to the struggle for unfettered aesthetic expression. A leading proponent of art for art's sake in England, OW
was a follower of Walter Pater
, from whose work he borrows in lavish quantity, and, like Pater, he was much influenced by the French l'art pour l'art poets, notably Charles Baudelaire
and Théophile Gautier
.
Clements, Patricia. Baudelaire and the English Tradition. Princeton University Press.
140-83
More recently, his brilliant aesthetic essays have drawn serious attention as the basis for many critical propositions . . . which we like to attribute to more ponderous names.
Ellmann, Richard, editor. The Critic as Artist: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Random House.
x
His notoriety as a casualty of oppressive laws against the practice of homosexuality is also the subject of a good deal of recent critical comment.
AL
published articles in many periodicals, particularly the Cambridge Review (from 9 June 1880), Temple Bar (from the same year), the popular magazine London Society (from 1883), the Jewish Chronicle, the Star (from 3...
Author summary
Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney
, though American, is best known as a Paris salonnière. She specialized in memoirs and pensées, though she also produced poetry, drama, novels, essays, and dialogues. Writing primarily in French but also...
Author summary
Ada Leverson
AL
has been best remembered for her association with Oscar Wilde
. But her six novels have never disappeared from public view or critical appreciation, and today interest has also developed in her journalism: stories...
Author summary
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
, remains best known for her fierce Irish Nationalist poems published in the Nation under the pseudonym Speranza. She became known too for her translations of both poetry and fiction...
politics
Julia Ward Howe
In 1882 Oscar Wilde
, making his lecture tour of the USA, spoke at the Boston Music Hall. While he was in Boston he made several visits to the Howe residence, and he also...
politics
Josephine Butler
Even after her retirement from an active public life, JB
continued to be interested in a number of international causes. She supported Home Rule in Ireland (two bills for which were defeated in 1886); she...
Occupation
Marie Corelli
From 1886, when she published her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, onward, MC
produced books at great speed. She was an instant success, and throughout her life she sold approximately 100,000 books...
Occupation
Ella D'Arcy
As well as a writer, EDA
was an editor, assistant to Henry Harland
on the avant-garde Yellow Book, published by John Lane
of the Bodley Head
. Sources agree on this, though she herself...
Occupation
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
She became so well-known as a writer that during her son Oscar
's 1882 American tour he was heralded simply as Speranza's Son.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research.
199: 298
In later years, when his literary fame increased, she...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
Reviews were almost all positive.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
255
Writing in the Dial in September 1922, T. S. Eliot
used this novel as the most notable example of the psychoanalytical type which, however, he disapproved in principle. Its...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
During the early part of ICB
's career she was little regarded or understood. Raymond Mortimer
was one of the first to perceive her quality, and she quickly began to attract the attention of younger...
Literary responses
Amy Levy
After AL
's premature death, much comment focussed on the possible causes of her suicide. But some critics focussed on her writing, notably Oscar Wilde
in The Woman's World. To write thus at six-and-twenty...
Literary responses
Rosamund Marriott Watson
Oscar Wilde
's review of this collection for The Woman's World called RMWone of our most artistic workers in poetry.
Hughes, Linda K. “A Woman Poet Angling for Notice: Rosamund Marriott Watson”. Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880-1930, edited by Marysa Demoor and Marysa Demoor, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 134-55.
139
In 1902William Archer
called the collection less mature than her later volumes...
Literary responses
Sarah Grand
Elaine Showalter
brought SG
to the attention of late-twentieth-century New Woman and feminist criticism in A Literature of Their Own, 1977, where she discussed The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book.
Mangum, Teresa. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel. University of Michigan Press.
220
Since...
Literary responses
Charlotte Stopes
A more recent Shakespeare scholar, Samuel Schoenbaum
patronisingly attributes her employment by the Athenæum not to her own merit but to a journalistic coup in ingratiating herself with the management.
