After WH completed The Crowded Street, she began work on a historical romance based on the life of John Wycliffe and titled The Runners.By February 1927, nine publishers had rejected this novel.WH commented: Two years' writing wasted—or possibly not wasted . . . I may have gained experience even if it never sees daylight. Her biographer Marion Shaw argues that the relationship between Wycliffe and the woman he loves re-enacts WH 's relationship with Vera Brittain .

He submitted this poem (on an unimpeachably religious theme) to the Jesuit periodical The Month, but after long delay they declined to print it. GMH correctly concluded that the poetry he wished to write was too disquieting for his superiors to accept. This rejection was followed by others.

AMH submitted her large painting Gretchen at the Fountain to the British Institution , which, to the disgust of Dante Gabriel Rossetti , rejected it.

Though AH had a sturdy relationship with his book publisher—he renewed his three-year contract with Chatto and Windus in 1941 for the seventh time—his film work during the war years was freelance. In 1939, before the war began, he signed an eight-week contract with MGM to write a script, Madame Curie, for which he was paid the enormous sum of $15,000—though the script used for the film was finally not his, but one written by F. Scott Fitzgerald .

The play had been rejected for performance at the Christiania Theatre in Oslo. It was not performed until 1881, in Stockholm.

Production was arranged at Birmingham Repertory Theatre under Sir Barry Jackson , when the Lord Chamberlain's office banned the play. The Foreign Office , MJ learned, thought it most undesirable that anything humorous should be produced about the coming Peace negotiations, especially anything making fun of American or (even worse) Russian delegates. There was no appeal. Members of Parliament could do nothing because the Lord Chamberlain belonged to the royal household. Publishers declined to take on anything so topical, when paper shortages would mean a long delay before it appeared. When a friend of MJ wrote to the Times Literary Supplement about this, the editor did not print her letter, but replied privately that he understood the play lampooned identifiable national leaders, which was not true. The New Statesman, however, printed a letter from MJ setting the record straight.

The two arrived in New York with the completed work, but the managers rejected it. Buchanan decided to stage it himself at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, where it first appeared on 30 March 1885. Cora Tanner took the title role in Boston the following month. Dartmouth College in New Hampshire holds a note of another Boston production, on 7 March 1887, which calls the piece a new realistic and emotional drama of English life. A promptbook from 1885 remains in manuscript at the New York Public Library , and the copy of the play submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office for censoring, with blank inset pages bearing manuscript notes, has been reproduced in microprint and is widely available. The play seems not to have reached print, though a tale based on it was published in 1885 by the Aldine Publishing Co. , and a novelisation for young people, published with the original authors' permission, appeared in 1892. After the first run, the theatrical manager Colonel Sinn bought up the American rights to the play on very generous terms. Because this play was the first of many that Jay and Buchanan composed together, John A. Cassidy argues that her part was relatively minor, but there is no evidence as to this.

In January 1850 GJ published a controversial article entitled Religious Faith and Modern Scepticism in the radical Westminster Review. This details recent writing by critics of Christianity such as Thomas Carlyle and J. A. Froude . The editor of the Westminster Review, William Edward Hickson , initially refused the article but then printed it on the condition that GJ receive no payment, which she suspected was his mode of protesting . . . questionable doctrines.

It took her some time to find a publisher who wanted to bring out this novel.

MAK mentioned in 1866, without assigning it a date, a tract she had published with Messrs Jarrold which sold 22,000 copies. In mentioning this she seeks to avoid the imputation of vanity by ascribing its extensive sale to its price, twopence. In 1869 she related how another of her small theological wares was rejected by a publisher who had often issued her tracts in the past with the objection that it lacked specific allusion to the leading doctrines of Christianity. She used this anecdote as an example of the odious bigotry about precise dogma which she found too common.

She had initially submitted the manuscript to be serialized in the Churchman's Companion, but publisher Joseph Masters of London thought highly enough of it to publish it as a volume.

A year later, in December 1895, when MK was back from her first West African trip, she resumed submitting manuscripts about her travels to Macmillan . They assigned Dr Henry Guillemard to be her editor, but friction soon grew between them as he couldn't refrain from rewriting rather than reworking. She eventually ceased to allow him to edit her writing.

At the end of her life FK composed in manuscript the story of her life in journalism, which would surely have been of later interest as the account of a woman in a man's world. But her publisher rejected it, and after that she destroyed the manuscript.

She says that, not being personally known to Beecher Stowe, she has not asked leave for her dedication, but that Stowe 's work for the black slaves suggests she would favour a work written to expose an exploitation which is as bad as or worse than slavery. She repeats the slavery analogy several times through the book. Her title-page quotes Montaigne , Dante , and the Psalms. Her preface waxes sardonic, even sarcastic, about poetic or romantic treatments of the governess, which represent sterling characters purified to even greater excellence by the fires of suffering and emerging to the reward of virtue: an immense rise in the social scale, a marriage uniting love and interest, or a colossal fortune from an old Indian uncle, before supposed dead. (This last is an allusion to the protagonist's sudden accession to a fortune in Brontë 's Jane Eyre.) Such things, she says, are not realistic. A persecuted governess is more likely to become hardened than purified; more likely to become morose and ill-tempered than a saint-like, patient martyr; in many instances, alas! more likely to become cunning and deceitful than to continue faithful and upright. Her Anne Sherwood, she asserts, may be regarded as the unexaggerated united testimony of some ninety or a hundred professional gentlewomen representing their class. It was, says FAK , while sitting in a governess's cold and lonely room, in a house full of luxury and social pleasure from which she was barred, that she dipped her pen in gall, determined to tell the governess's wrongs to those powerful and benevolent people who might do something to help. When she had finished writing she made out a list of twelve publishers whom she might try, but her first choice, Richard Bentley , accepted the work immediately and paid her a hundred pounds for it.

Eight years after her final novel appeared, and fourteen after she stopped writing fiction, ML (solicited by Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett ) submitted a paper to the Recess Committee on aspects of Irish Home Rule. It remains unpublished.

According to her own account, LCL wrote her notorious novel Glenarvon and sent it to press within one month, while articles of separation were being drawn up by her husband following her act of violence towards a page in his employ. This statement, however, contradicts her own references to it as in progress two and a half years before, and the assumption of commentators like Paul Douglass that she must have begun to write it in about autumn 1812, immediately after her break-up with Byron . In August 1814 she asked John Murray , Are you serious about my novel?—presumably feeling some anxiety since she had so often sounded flippant about it herself. Her work on it was interrupted by her visit to France in July-October 1815. In the end, John Murray declined to publish Glenarvon, perhaps feeling that too many powerful people might be too deeply offended by it. Henry Colburn , however, accepted it, despite some negative readers' reports.LCL had a fair copy of Glenarvon done by a copyist, and when somebody came for her manuscript she dressed up as a page, while her governess and amanuensis Thomasina Webster wore Lady Caroline's clothes; apparently this was done for sheer love of mischief. She later told Colburn this was the only copy she had. Colburn paid her £500 for it, in two instalments: only fifty pounds less than he had just paid Sydney Morgan for O'Donnel, which powerfully suggests the market value of celebrity. LCL was then horrified to find how many new errors were introduced by the printers as they implemented her first set of proof corrections. As publication day approached she grew unbearably nervous.

She had cut down her first draft, of nearly 700 pages in typescript, to 578 pages, and intended to cut it by another hundred. It was, however, accepted by all of her publishers: McClelland and Stewart in Canada, Knopf in the USA, and Macmillan in England.

On the back of her thesis typescript, ML wrote her first short story, Miss Holland.It was published in the Dublin Magazine, April-June 1939, after several rejections from other publications.

It is hard to overestimate the importance, for ML 's output and for the survival of her work, of her patron Bridget Freemantle , who appears in her writing as Artemisia. From September 1745 almost all of Leapor's poems were addressed to Freemantle. Under Freemantle's auspices ML 's tragedy was sent to London to be read by the theatre manager Colley Cibber . (Leapor wrote with mixed feelings of its return, like a prodigal child, stained with claret.)

SL had the idea for it while in debtors' prison with her father . Contemporary rumour said she had written it to get him out of prison; but at that time she apparently made no move to exploit her idea financially. She did so later: the play appeared during the season that her father was too ill to appear on stage, and the family must have needed money. It was also suggested that her father had helped her with writing it, though his literary talent was evidently inferior to hers. It was also said that he was reluctant to see his daughters become authors, on grounds that this might interfere with their becoming rational and useful members of society—which sounds as if he feared it might damage their class status or their marriageability. She had to struggle with her own reluctance to submit her play, anonymously, to John Harris of Covent Garden . He made carping criticisms and demanded cuts; she withdrew it and submitted it (still anonymous) to George Colman of the Haymarket , who put it on stage after requiring some further revision. It was published with her name the same year.

VL 's political stance was seen as dangerously unpatriotic: only a few of her essays were published by the Labour Leader, Nation, and New Statesman. In letter to Havelock Ellis in September 1914, Olive Schreiner asks, Did you see the Labour Leader? It is the only paper that is standing out. The other papers all refuse to take VL 's and Bertrand Russell 's articles.

Michael Joseph had been her usual publisher in the 1950s and 60s. Her current hardback publisher, Jonathan Cape , and her current paperback publisher, had rejected this novel when she submitted it under her pseudonym.DL wanted to get an unbiassed reading, to forestall the kneejerk reactions of both reviewers and the public, which she felt likely to be based as much on her previous work as on anything new which bore her name. Blind reviewing, she felt, was the way to achieve justice. Once it was out, the secret of its authorship soon followed.

AL 's first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin', which she had written in one day a week taken from work, was published after some rejections.

As a student at Dartington College of Arts she was constantly writing short stories. Alan Ross , editor of the London Magazine, accepted one of these after two rejections (the first of these after writing tosh all over it) and two radical revisions.