Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Emily Dickinson
-
Standard Name: Dickinson, Emily
Birth Name: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
is primarily known for her poems; she was also a letter writer. She published very little during her lifetime and the full scope of her output—some 1,775 poems—was discovered only after her death.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf.
4
ED
's verse thoroughly engages with the issue of identity, how best to be.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Knopf.
9
She is held to be among the best and most original of nineteenth-century US poets.
The poems in Others specialise in evocations of other people, often presented, as the titles of the poems acknowledge, not through an individual observer but through the self-confirming judgement of a couple or a group:...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Shields
Following an epigraph from Emily Dickinson
, Tell all the truth but tell it slant,CS
here experiments with melodrama, coincidence, and other infringements on naturalism.
Wachtel, Eleanor, editor. “Carol Shields”. More Writers and Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel, Vintage Canada, pp. 36-56.
37
She also experiments with many voices, including what...
Education
Penelope Shuttle
At seventeen, she says (after the successive discoveries of Charlotte Brontë
, T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
), she began reading Rilke
. Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.
Mslexia. Mslexia Publications.
47
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Shuttle
The first book that affected PS
deeply was Brontë
's Jane Eyre, with whose protagonist she identified.
Steffens, Daneet. “Penelope Shuttle”. Mslexia, No. 33, pp. 46-8.
48
At fifteen she read T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
and conceived a wish to be...
Literary responses
Penelope Shuttle
Reviewers were respectful, even enthusiastic. PS
was likened to poets as various as Eavan Boland
and Emily Dickinson
, and praised for energy, for vigorous and various abundance,and for attention to the erogenous zones...
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer
, with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Textual Features
Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS
later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
Textual Production
Emma Tennant
ET
published Wild Nights, a fictional childhood memoir, titled from the opening words of a poem by Emily Dickinson
.
“Emma Tennant”. Fantastic Fiction.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
14
Reception
Michelene Wandor
MW
won an international Emmy Award for her television adaptation of William Luce
's play about Emily Dickinson
, The Belle of Amherst, for Thames Television
.
Michelene Wandor. http://www.mwandor.co.uk/.
Goodman, Lizbeth, and Jane De Gay. Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre. Harwood Academic Publishers.
90
Friends, Associates
Sylvia Townsend Warner
US poet Genevieve Taggard
launched a literary friendship (and correspondence, from which Warner's surviving eighteen letters have recently been published) when she sent Warner a poem in 1941. Taggard was a poet particularly appreciated by...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW
's total reviews eventually numbered over one hundred and fifty. In her first year she considered children's books (including a title by Beatrix Potter
), books on design, and second-rate novels. Her efforts were...