Before she became a successful dramatist in the 1930s, DS made a couple of abortive attempts at writing plays. In 1922 she attempted her first play, Pirate Ships (later renamed Portrait of the Artist's Wives), after reading William Archer 's Playmaking. She was unable to find an agent who would accept the play, which had a plot that centred on young women who made a habit of borrowing other women's husbands.

In the late 1920s, in urgent need of money, ES became a newspaper columnist. Her articles for the Weekly Dispatch had titles like Our Family Ghost, My Awkward Moments, and When is Poetry a Crime?Life magazine rejected an article they had commissioned from her about Marilyn Monroe when Sitwell wrote sympathetically instead of satirically about Monroe, with whom she got on well.

She spent a year searching for a publisher before having her book accepted by Blackwood 's; it appeared under a system known as half-profits, in which the author paid money up front in return for half the profits; a second edition was called for by October.

She began work on this book as early as 1878. Her wish was to create a History of Appropriation and she confided to her journal: my ambition would be satisfied by a place in libraries with Hobbes , Gibbon , and Adam Smith . Her feelings towards the work varied. At times she became disenchanted with it and despaired of finding a publisher. Indeed, she submitted the work to at least three publishers before it was jointly accepted by Macmillan and Sonnenschein . At other moments, however, she took more pleasure in her efforts: Am tolerably happy over it, which I'm afraid is a bad sign, as I liked writing both the books that nobody in particular has yet liked to read. Her mother helped her with proofreading. Primitive Civilizations was reissued by Cambridge University Press in 2010, online and in print-on-demand format.

It had been accepted by the time the poetry volume came out.

The Crimean War drew from LCS a poem which, some time around 1854, her sister Arabella Shore submitted to The Spectator without her sister's knowledge. It appeared there under Arabella's title for it, War Music.

ES published her third novel, The Daughter-in-Law, which she had taken to publisher John Lane , making a blind shot at the first name to turn up.

After leaving her husband and while living in Paris with her lover Jules Sandeau , GS took on her first job, that of writing for the journal Figaro, but also doggedly pursued a more literary life. She received seven francs for each column. With a manuscript in hand, she appealed for financial support to a member of the Académie Française and was told: Do not make books, make children.

IHR also wrote a controversial opinion piece on religion and sent it to The Leader, a radical weekly newspaper published in London, though it did not appear, perhaps because editors found her views too extreme to print.

About the time she published her first novel, ER also composed a three-act play entitled Richelieu in Love. She submitted it to Covent Garden Theatre (then under the management of Madame Vestris ), calling herself a cadet at Woolwich—that is, at the Royal Military Academy there. She was claiming a young, male, and somewhat swaggering identity. What happened next is related by Robinson herself in a preface to the play's printed text, and in the memoirs of James Robinson Planché , who had just begun working for Vestris as weeder of unsolicited manuscripts. Planché (himself a prolific playwright) later remembered that he had felt convinced that the play, notwithstanding the smartness of much of the dialogue and knowledge of dramatic effect displayed in its composition, could not hold its ground upon the stage, even if it should happen not to offend the Lord Chamberlain's office, which was charged with licensing plays for performance. Planché felt that Richelieu in Love had scarcely strength enough in it for three acts in so large a theatre as Covent Garden and would be better recast as two acts. He argued that a pervasive, indefinable unacceptability of tone (a matter of political, perhaps sexual radicalism versus good taste) could not be cured by specific omissions, only by a general reworking. He was, in fact, asking for revision, not rejecting outright—which he was not empowered to do with a play he considered actable.

It had been commissioned by Martin Browne , the lessee of the Mercury Theatre, who, inspired by the success of T. S. Eliot 's Murder in the Cathedral, set out to encourage poets to produce and audiences to attend verse drama. A typescript alternative version and AR 's own revised and corrected set of galley proofs are in the Bodleian Library .

She had not yet, apparently, succeeded in selling a novel to a London publisher, despite her walking the stony-hearted streets to offer her manuscripts to publisher after publisher, who unanimously declined them.

In 1909, during the height of her involvement with the WSPU , Margaret Haig Mackworth (later MHVR ) began publishing articles in praise of militancy in the Western Mail. She had been walking with her father near her childhood home in Wales when they came upon the editor of the Mail. Her father , though ethically against militancy, took the opportunity to secure the editor's acceptance of occasional articles on suffrage by his daughter. She had doubts about her ability as a writer, but she felt that she could not reject such a heaven sent opportunity to further suffrage. She rapidly increased her output to three articles weekly in three local newspapers, usually disseminating essays written for Votes for Women. She was also asked to review books related to women's rights, one of which was H. G. Wells 's Marriage. She called this book the cloven hoof of the anti-suffragist movement. The review was printed in Votes for Women.

Her relations with the magazine were not, however, entirely happy. In October 1773 it had reprinted a song of hers, without permission and with various inaccuracies. In June 1778 it followed on with a similarly unauthorized reprinting of part of her preface to The Old English Baron (published in March 1778). Reeve softened her complaints about this by offering the editors a translation of Lettres d'Aza (the sequel by Ignace Hugary de La Marche-Courmont to Françoise de Graffigny 's Lettres d'une Péruvienne). Instead of accepting or even acknowledging this offer, the editors then published her cordial if strained epistolary negotiations with them in their To our Correspondents" column in June, upon which she ceased contributing.

KR sent the Hogarth Press the manuscript of a book of poems, but they did not publish her, either at that time or later.

An obituarist had whetted the public appetite by remarking that AR had left a number of manuscripts ready for print. She probably wrote most of the novel Gaston de Blondeville in winter 1802-3. Late in 1803, according to report, the novel was in the hands of a publisher; but it was then either withdrawn or rejected, and it may have been the romance which she was rumoured to be preparing for print in March 1822.AR used a range of medieval sources for Gaston de Blondeville, many of them from editions by the Society of Antiquaries , as her husband 's notes make clear. Her biographer Rictor Norton believes, indeed, that William Radcliffe had the status of a collaborator on the final text. The four volumes contain an introduction which, Norton demonstrates, AR wrote or completed after 1812 (since it draws on material of at least that date in her journals) and therefore many years after she wrote most of the novel itself. This introduction may originally have incorporated a critical essay on some of the principles of AR 's fiction, which appeared the same year in the New Monthly Magazine (owned by Henry Colburn , the publisher of the four volumes) entitled On the Supernatural in Poetry.William Radcliffe arranged to have the profits of these volumes received by trustees for charitable uses. A recent re-issue has appeared from Valancourt Books (not their only Radcliffe text).

MP published (at his own expense after many rejections) Du côté de chez Swann, the first novel of his ground-breaking serial Künstlerroman, A la recherche du temps perdu, which he continued to write until his death.

In spring 1853, AP submitted a poem under the pseudonym of Mary Berwick to her family friend Charles Dickens , as editor of Household Words. It was accepted, and she became a regular contributor, sending her verse in via a circulating library. She took this roundabout means of contributing because she felt that if he thought her work had no merit he might either find it painful to reject it or feel compelled by virtue of their relationship to print it. Therefore, as she said to her family, I have made up my mind to take my chances fairly with the unknown volunteers. As Dickens later recalled in his posthumous introduction to a collection of her poems, at the journal's offices they really knew nothing whatever of her, except that she was remarkably business-like, punctual, self-reliant, and reliable—though the staff came to believe that she was a governess. In December 1854, just as he had sent the Christmas number to press, Dickens dined at the Procter home with a proof in hand, in which he praised a pretty poem by Mary Berwick. (All AP 's contributions to Household Words were, according to custom, anonymous. She used a pseudonym for her correspondence with Dickens.) The day after this incident she disclosed her identity.

Mary Russell Mitford declined to feel sorry for JP , who was, she said, sick . . . of her condemned play (that is since Switzerland failed). Her disease is wounded vanity.

A story she wrote at twenty (in December 1952, within months of her rejection by Harvard summer school and her first serious suicide attempt), Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, was rejected by Mademoiselle, and published nearly seventy years later by Faber and Faber in early 2019 after an excerpt had appeared in the Guardian in late 2018.

After asking the actor George Powell to help her get it accepted at Drury Lane, she had then taken it to the other theatre, and claimed that Powell plagiarised it in his The Imposture Defeated. Powell beat MP to the curtain with his play, which opened at Drury Lane in September. Pix's play was published by 21 December 1697, dedicated to Sir Robert Marsham , a Whig baronet and Member of Parliament. Her dedication implies that he may have supported the other side in the plagiarism debate. The play was re-issued with new prefatory matter in 1699 as The French Beau. A copy of the first edition, though cheaply printed like all Pix's plays, was recently offered by for sale by Pickering and Chatto for $450 US.

LP perhaps offered a volume of Memoirs to a publisher for the first time.

She began writing it towards the close of 1864 when our country was dark with sorrowing women and revised it so many times that I could have said it by heart. It took two years from the time she sent the story to Ticknor and Fields to the time it appeared. She claims not to have derived any joy from the publication: The book was accepted, and still this piece of good luck did not make my head spin. . . . I went soberly back to my hack work.

The drama was also reprinted in EJP 's collection Under the Aspens, 1882. The preface to this collection gives a rare glimpse at reasons why some Victorian poetic drama failed to reach the stage: The Wynnes of Wynhavod, the single work which fills the dramatic portion of this volume, was written in the hope that—first attempt as it is at that high prize of a poet's ambition—it might, with the kindly aid of some borrowed technical experience, be found proper for representation on the stage. The first attempt, however, to put this first attempt in the way of benefiting by managerial help, induced an experience of so different a nature, that I was fain to make this earliest example of the treatment to which authors are liable at the hands of managers my last, and to content myself with an appeal to the public on literary ground alone.

View reference

Pfeiffer, Emily Jane. Under the Aspens. Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882.

vii