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.
But she found herself interrupted by illness and distracted by financial battles on behalf of her son, and by renewed attacks in the press on her mother
's reputation. She now expected another year to...
Textual Production
Helen Waddell
HW
provided (anonymously) the introduction to a Constable
reprint of A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke
, Daughter of Colley Cibber, one in a series they were issuing of rediscovered works...
Textual Features
Isabella Banks
The Neglected Wife describes a husband neglectful of his promise to cherish his wife and guard her from blighting care, or undermining grief,
Banks, Isabella, and George Linnaeus Banks. Daisies in the Grass. R. Hardwicke.
118
but who, on the contrary, has many extramarital affairs. Like Mary Wollstonecraft
Textual Features
Helena Wells
HW
says she has more respect for the upper classes than some of our modern reformists.
Wells, Helena. Letters on Subjects of Importance to the Happiness of Young Females. L. Peacock; W. Creech.
7
She recommends reading poetry and history, not novels: Novel reading tends to enervate the mind. We rise from...
Textual Features
Charlotte Yonge
The second volume is again rich in women's writing. Its first item is Elizabeth Gunning
's Family Stories; or, Evenings at my Grandmother's. CY
mentions with approval another item, A Puzzle for a Curious...
Textual Features
Anna Margaretta Larpent
This later diary, generally written daily at any odd moment, provides indexing of special events which reveals AML
's methodical character. Occasional months are missing here and there. The diarist offers penetrating comment on a...
Textual Features
Hannah More
HM
writes her Hints in full political consciousness of the likelihood that she is trying to shape a future ruler. Her claim to have remained uninfluenced by Wollstonecraft
or Catharine Macaulay
(whom she called patriotic...
Textual Features
Mary Stott
Here MS
writes grippingly of her own life, and illuminatingly about myriad subjects of public or cultural interest: the lives, customs, and deaths of newspapers, the conspiracy of silence about sex which had not dissipated...
Textual Features
Susanna Haswell Rowson
Contents include lives of Elizabeth Singer Rowe
and of Mary Wollstonecraft
(the latter reprinted from the Monthly Visitor of London). Among the poems (some of them specifically attributed to SHR
) are one entitled...
Textual Features
Muriel Jaeger
MJ
here traces the shift from eighteenth-century tolerance and scepticism to Victorian religious earnestness. She makes good use of writing during these periods, including writing by women (novels, diaries, letters, memoirs), showing herself a highly...
Textual Features
George Eliot
Miss Arrowpoint saves herself, while Mirah, the young Jewish woman whom Daniel eventually marries, needs him to save her from a suicide attempt reminiscent of that of Mary Wollstonecraft
. Gwendolen, at the climactic moment...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...
Textual Features
Anna Wheeler
The Appeal begins with an Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler in which William Thompson
expresses his reasons for writing the Appeal: an attempt to arrange the expression of those feelings, sentiments, and reasonings, which...
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
This book depends on poking fun at its subjects, and invites its readers to join in Sitwell's superior amusement. Some of her subjects deserve better, like Margaret Fuller
, who (despite the adjective in the...
Textual Features
Hannah Brand
This heroic tragedy (full title Huniades; or, The Siege of Belgrade) is given with passages restored that were omitted in performance. It is set in 1456 (three years after Constantinople, capital of the Christian...
