Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Standard Name: Wollstonecraft, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Wollstonecraft
Married Name: Mary Godwin
Pseudonym: Mr Cresswick, Teacher of Elocution
Pseudonym: M.
Pseudonym: W.
MW
has a distinguished historical place as a feminist: as theorist, critic and reviewer, novelist, and especially as an activist for improving women's place in society. She also produced pedagogy or conduct writing, an anthology, translation, history, analysis of politics as well as gender politics, and a Romantic account of her travels in Scandinavia.
The book markedly refrains from celebrating Mary Wollstonecraft
as a champion of women's rights or from glorifying her exploits in any way. MB
states firmly that Wollstonecraft's most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Alice Meynell
Many of the essays reprinted here focus on women writers who were, to put it mildly, little known to the public in the 1940s. These included: Anna Seward
and Joanna Baillie
, as well as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Josepha Hale
SJH
does in the main a fine job in her coverage of British women writers, having something to say even about the extremely obscure. Dorothea Primrose Campbell
, for instance (who was living in poverty...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Amelia Opie
Aiming at a reasoned critique, through Adeline and Glenmurray, of Wollstonecraft
's principles, and specifically her relationship with Godwin
, AO
seems to give higher priority to the intensification of her heroine's virtue, self-sacrifice, and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Hamilton
Again EH
takes the radicals as her target. The phrase modern philosophers was in common use: the Gentleman's Magazine had turned it on Mary Wollstonecraft in reviewing her first major political work. Yet Hamilton makes...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Catherine Hutton
Jane Oakwood's brother has only one woman author (Elizabeth Inchbald
) in his library; Jane on the other hand is a mine of information and opinion about several generations of a female literary tradition...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Helena Wells
HW
's narrator represents a youthful reader exclaiming in disgust, And this is called a novel? . . . Why there is not an old castle to be pried into, nor a rusty key found...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay
, she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
The preface to this book, newly written for its publication, is SL
's major critical statement about the woman's literary tradition and her own place in it. She mentions the hostile reception of her own...
AS
's correspondence often deals with literary matters as well as with social matters and personalities. She writes with astonishing freedom to Hester Piozzi
about the latter's travel book Observations and Reflections: not only...
Violence
Dorothea Du Bois
In DDB
's fictionalised account of her father, he is irrationally and childishly jealous, given to uttering threats of serious violence. Like Mary Wollstonecraft
, Dorothea knew what it was as a child to try...