ED was not afraid to push her work in the competitive world of magazine publication. When, years later, she submitted a poem entitled Carlingford Bay to The Empire (a paper launched in 1850 by the radical politician Henry Parkes ) and Parkes rejected it, she wrote to argue against his decision. The Empire, she pointed out, a bastion of liberal thinking about Australian issues, regularly published the poetry of the nativist Charles Harpur (whom a modern commentator calls a representative of the dominant nationalist masculine literary tradition), but it needed to cater also to readers whose cultural tastes had been formed in the Old World.

This literary satire was the first fruit of his wish that she should write a series of dramas for young people. Its manuscript survives in the Bodleian Library . Sheridan rejected it for Drury Lane . ME later wrote many more Edgeworthstown entertainments.

In her afterword to Memoirs from the Women's PrisonNES wrote, in connection with the way her writing was adjudged a political offence, such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. She had a fictional diary rejected by her teacher when she was thirteen; she was already keeping an actual, secret diary, which she burned or destroyed in case it should be found.

VF also provided an article for Wilde's magazine in May of the same year. In January 1889, Wilde rejected her tribute to the New Year after both he and she agreed that this poem would look positively unpunctual in the February number.

EF 's first novel, The Romance of Christina, which she worked at obsessively as an escape from her poverty-pinched life at home during her young-adult years, was rejected, though in an encouraging way, by Smith Elder .

EF wrote her first novel at about twelve, on loose paper which she then stapled together. She called it The Gatecrashers. As an undergraduate at Newnham , she wrote a novel about the market boys of Leicester (a streetwise adolescent society she knew from the outside only). She found the activity absorbing, not private but observed and shared with friends. Two publishers, Heinemann and Macmillan , expressed interest when she approached them before writing, but rejected the finished manuscript (though, in the case of Macmillan) with encouraging comment on the dialogue). EF then burned the work, which she later regretted.

Around January 1685 (she says both that she was in her seventieth year and that Charles II was very close to his death) she travelled again to London bearing a paper for the king which she intended as her last words to him. This time Charles was Rough and Angry and refused to take her paper, but she handed out several copies to courtiers. Judge Jefferies told her that both her little and her great papers were too long, and offered to speak to the king if she would give him a short Paper, a kind of executive summary, to use. She composed one, limiting herself to about fifty words, but within a few days Charles was dead, and James II proved no more receptive.

Charlotte Smith knew of this work-in-progress on 26 July 1800, when she told Mary Hays how she wished she could help EF with money or moral support. On 31 October 1801 Hays noted that Thomas Underwood of Underwood and Black was in touch with EF —perhaps about this second novel. It is still not known whether the work appeared and has remained untraced, or whether it was a pre-publication casualty of stress and poverty, or whether perhaps it was The Castle of Indolence, a novel by Fenwick which it seems William and Mary Jane Godwin rejected for publication in 1806.

This play had been written at least three years earlier by Dr Humphrey Bartholomew , and given by him to SF , apparently to revise. Soon after she submitted it, Garrick expressed the opinion that it still needed a good deal more work from her. She hoped to get it done by Christmas, but apparently did not.

She wrote this book nearly twenty years after the experiences on which she based it, and not long after her husband died. With it she switched publishers for her novels, from Duckworth to Collins , whose senior editor, Richard Ollard, who read the manuscript and offered her a contract involving an advance of two thousand pounds: ten times her previous advance.

As an unmarried girl, Joan Rosita Torr wrote an article on bird life which was accepted for publication. She also wrote the draft of a novel, but this she burned.

The Australian Journal regularly let contributors know in its pages whether or not their submissions had been accepted. On 7 October 1865 one such entry, addressed to Waif Wander, accepted her poem Gold (published on 20 January 1866) and her short story My Lady Jane (which saw print on 21 October 1865). The notice said the paper was much obliged for the latter. Another piece, entitled To Katie, was rejected.

There are two plausible explanations for her anonymity: either she wanted to protect her Quaker family from being blamed for her non-judgmental handling of a married woman's love affair with another man, or her publisher wanted to distance the novel from her first two literary efforts. The sensational subject-matter may explain why the publisher of her first two efforts refused it. As JF remarked, Henry S. Kingkindly and parentally advised me, for the sake of whatever literary reputation I might have obtained, not to publish the novel. She knew her own mind, however, too well to accept this well-meant suggestion. I replied, somewhat petulantly, that I acknowledged their right to refuse it, but not to advise me in the matter of it, and I would publish it.

As usual for fiction, she published as Frank Danby. This novel's length (120,000 words) provoked Marie Belloc Lowndes to joke about the episodes of jeopardy being recurrent. JF feared in 1911 that Methuen would refuse the book once they had read it (presumably because of its sexual content) but Lowndes reported that they paid her £1,200 for it, while Macmillan , USA, paid her £800 and judged it her best book yet.

GF received 12 guineas for this first effort. After she sent a second poem to Bentley's, however, Richard Bentley advised her that she would do better to turn her attention to prose works. The day she received this rejection GF began writing Ellen Middleton.

As early as March-April 1788 AY 's backers Eliza Dawson and Wilmer Gossip were suggesting that a play would offer a better chance of financial return than poetry. Yearsley drafted her lost play Bawdin at about this time. With the help of Sarah Siddons , the play was submitted to Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Drury Lane . Nothing came of this, though late in the year efforts on its behalf were still being made by Lord Bristol and Lady Elizabeth Foster (who wrote flatteringly to AY of esteem and admiration). It was said to be in Sheridan's hands, with a promise of staging if it proved suitable; but the Regency Crisis seems to have produced a delay which AY was not willing to tolerate, and so the matter lapsed.

Although her daughter says that her interest in literature (like that in science) came much later than her childhood enthusiasms for drawing, calligraphy, and scholarship, Margaret Scott (later MG ) at seventeen so admired Dante that she began to translate the Inferno into English verse. She was still as much an artist as a writer: each canto was fair-copied in exquisite writing, and had an illuminated cover of appropriate design. She did other translation too, from German as well as Italian. She also wrote poetry which she sought to publish, but became discouraged when Blackwood's rejected her.

The spur to writing this account came thirty years earlier, when MG first felt herself enlightened, her understanding of events in general clarified, by Sylvia Pankhurst 's memoir The Suffragette Movement, 1931, and then worked hard but unsuccessfully to get what she saw its misrepresentation of herself altered. After failing in her campaign for a revised edition of Pankhurst's account, she began gathering material for her own. Several publishers rejected her manuscript, saying it was not a commercial proposition. It is not clear exactly when this happened. She ended by issuing the work through a small press as a co-operative enterprise, using a gift of money originally offered her by Mary Dreier to help with her husband's medical expenses. This origin means that the book is now rare. Though beautifully designed, it is badly revised or proof-read, with typos and occasional missing words.

The novel had been twice offered to the publishing house of Chapman and Hall , and was recommended by William Harrison Ainsworth . After their reader (novelist George Meredith ) twice rejected it, EW took it to Smith and Elder , who also refused. Finally, East Lynne was offered to Richard Bentley , who accepted it following a reader's report by Geraldine Jewsbury in which she praised its invention while deploring its needless breaches of good taste. Jewsbury also criticised EW 's grammar and construction, and herself made revisions to them before the manuscript went to press. Such criticisms were to be often repeated throughout EW 's career: Fraser's Magazine, for example, said after the release of Verner's Pride that in matters of construction Miss Braddon has a great advantage over Mrs Wood, who is apt to make use of words and expressions which grate on the ear of a strict grammarian.

While in reminiscence JSW was uncertain as to the title of this early composition, she acknowledged the influence on it of Ouida and Whyte Melville . She sent the story to the journal Wedding Bells but never received a reply. She later tried to write a collaborative story with two friends, but a quarrel ended the attempt. A subsequent military sketch appeared in a York paper, but she received no remuneration for it.

This work was in sixteen letters. HMW had difficulty finding a London publisher to take it.

She wanted to have Richardson 's opinion, as a leading London printer, as to whether a scientific dictionary might be profitable in this age of dictionaries. She had been meditat[ing] her scheme for a long time and was naturally planning to use an amanuensis. She was eminently qualified for this work, Johnson wrote, and had a long-standing, extensive collection of scientific texts, which indeed she appears to me to understand better than any person that I have ever known. She would, however, need a few of the latest publications, and Johnson apparently hoped that Richardson might supply these, as well as putting money into her work (tak[ing] some share in the copy and persuading others in the book trade to do likewise). This plan, however, did not come to fruition.

Her first publications in the Nation were translations and patriotic poems. Her love poems were rejected. She submitted her work as Speranza , with a covering letter signed John Fenshaw Ellis.

PW 's owner, John Wheatley , put out proposals for collecting and publishing a volume of her poems; but the project did not go through.