Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charles Dickens
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Standard Name: Dickens, Charles
Birth Name: Charles John Huffam Dickens
Indexed Name: Charles Dickens
Pseudonym: Boz
Pseudonym: Timothy Sparks
A prolific novelist, journalist, and editor of periodicals such as Household Words and All the Year Round, CD
crucially shaped Victorian fiction both by developing it as a dialogical, multi-plotted, and socially aware form and by his innovations in publishing serially. As a novelist he worked across a range of genres, including the bildungsroman, picaresque, Newgate, sensation and detective fiction, and usually with satiric or socially critical force. He was loved by readers for his humour, grotesquerie, action, and vigour. An influential public figure and phenomenally successful lecturer during his lifetime, his work continues to be central to popular understandings of nineteenth-century England, and in particular London.
Dickens
, on the other hand, though fond of both the Trollopes and the Ternans, apparently confided that he did not in the least care for Fanny, whom he judged, with evident misgivings, to be...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Angela Dickens
Elizabeth's father, Mary Angela's other grandfather, Frederick Mullet Evans, co-founded the printing firm Bradbury and Evans
, whose innovative use of a steam-driven rotary press brought it clients including the Illustrated London News and...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
In 1867, the year after their marriage, FET
and her husband separated for a while. They publicly said little of their troubles; they may have had disagreements over the scandal surrounding Ellen Ternan
and Charles Dickens
Family and Intimate relationships
Berta Ruck
Her Welsh grandmother, born Mary Anne Mathews
, whom she called Nain, had kept a youthful journal, some of which BR
prints.
AM
's mother, Christiana Weller
(later Thompson), was born in 1825. A concert pianist and painter, she met her husband, then a widower, at a Liverpool Mechanics' Institute
reception in 1844. They were married on...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eleanor Farjeon
EF
's father, Benjamin Leopold Farjeon
, grew up in a poor, orthodox, Jewish household in the East End of London. At thirteen he was working as an errand-boy for a Christian newspaper, avidly...
MD
was a great-grand-daughter of the novelist Charles Dickens
.
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
attended the last public reading by her grandfather Charles Dickens
, held at St James's Hall, London three months before he died. He performed excerpts from A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers at the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
FET
and her two sisters, Maria and Ellen or Nelly, were close to their mother and to each other, and were considered well-behaved and dutiful. All three performed on stage together when the girls were...
Education
Maya Angelou
Marguerite Johnson had already become a voracious reader, both of Black writers and of canonical dead white males. Shakespeare
, she wrote later, was my first white love.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Heinemann New Windmill Series.
12
She also enjoyed and respected...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
LMM
attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College
in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Education
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Their mother educated the sisters.
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.
FET
had a wonderful singing voice. Later in her life, with the financial assistance of Charles Dickens
and Anthony Trollope
, she travelled to Florence to study singing; her mother...
Education
Doris Lessing
Before attending school and after she left, Doris educated herself by reading. Her parents possessed copies of the classics, like Scott
, Dickens
, and Kipling
. She read widely in the nineteenth century—her favourites...
Education
Agatha Christie
By the time Agatha was born, Clara Miller
believed that girls ought not to learn to read before the age of eight. Defiantly, Agatha taught herself to read at five. She eagerly devoured Lewis Carroll
