Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Ellen Wood
-
Standard Name: Wood, Ellen
Birth Name: Ellen Price
Married Name: Mrs Henry Wood
Pseudonym: Johnny Ludlow
Pseudonym: Ensign Thomas Pepper
In a writing career spanning most of the second half of the nineteenth century, EW
produced a prodigious body of work (often writing two triple-deckers per year), including sketches, novels, and a series of interconnected Johnny Ludlow tales involving a character of that name, that were published over a twenty-year period. While much of her fiction takes the form of moralistic domestic dramas, EW
could also be fascinated by the grotesque, and many of her works have sensational and supernatural themes. Her reputation today rests almost exclusively on the phenomenally popular East Lynne, 1861, possibly the best seller among novels of the Victorian period and the only one of her works that has remained generally available.
Critic John Sutherland discerns the influence of Wilkie Collins
on the novel's plot. Certainly the figure of the mysterious woman in black who aims to avenge herself on her husband's destroyers recalls the description of...
Reception
Rosa Nouchette Carey
The Athenæum was lavish with faint praise. It likened Only the Governess to a tranquil backwater out of the main current of the turbid stream of modern fiction.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3151 (1888): 337
Praising Carey for not...
Reception
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White, along with Ellen Wood
's East Lynne,1861, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon
's Lady Audley's Secret, 1862, established the massive popularity of the sensation novel, a genre marked by...
Publishing
Jessie Fothergill
The copyright of the novel initially sold for £40 on 26 March 1877. Two months later, Richard Bentley and Son
recognized its commercial possibilities and drew up a new contract, increasing the price to £200...
Occupation
Naomi Jacob
After the First World War she became a performer herself, a character woman. She relates an anecdote of foiling an attempt to get her services for nine pounds a week when she had been...
Occupation
George Meredith
GM
worked as a journalist for the Ipswich Journal, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the Morning Post (where he was editor from 1867 to 1868). He served as literary critic for the Westminister...
In 1851 the Athenæum reviewer of Ravenscliffe still thought of The Admiral's Daughter as having heralded a remarkable addition to the phalanx of English authoresses.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1255 (1851): 1198
The preface writer for the cheap reprint...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
In 1951 Canadian novelist Robertson Davies
made this book the centre of a fictional anecdote: a distinguished professor bequeaths to his grand-daughter a box of battered old books (Lady Audley's Secret, Mrs Henry Wood
Literary responses
Ouida
In a Book Buyer article of January 1897, American novelist and short story writer Stephen Crane
called this novel Ouida's Masterpiece and a song of the brave. He particularly liked the character Cigarette, a figure...
Literary responses
Rosa Nouchette Carey
Elaine Hartnell
argues that the reception of RNC
's work was tied somewhat to its modes and places of publication, notably her serialisation in journals edited by Ellen Wood
, Charlotte Yonge
, and Annie S. Swan
Intertextuality and Influence
Rose Allatini
But the manuscript never reaches a publisher, for Olive gives it to her mother, aunt, and sister to read, with fearful results. To her aunt it is indecent and impossible; to her mother it is...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Atkins
Though AA
's preface concedes the the talent, the ingenuity, the very clever writing of sensation-authors,
Atkins, Anna. A Page from the Peerage. T. Cautley Newby.
i
it also hints that they are in it for the money, and expresses outrage at what it sees...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mrs Showes
This conclusion strikingly anticipates that of Ellen Wood
's East Lynne: it is not, however, known that Wood ever read Statira.
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
Nance is almost a colourless character apart from her capacity for passion. (In an apparently non-literary book, a tradition of steamy fiction is evoked when her desire to make Kitty sorry makes her think of...
