Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charles Dickens
-
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.
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
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
Pearl S. Buck
Mr Kung despised fiction and the Sydenstricker library contained only the supposedly factual Plutarch
's Lives and Foxe
's Book of Martyrs, but Pearl read fiction avidly in both Chinese and English, devouring Shakespeare
Education
Marie Corelli
Looking back on her early education, MC
wrote I managed to develop into a curiously determined independent little personality, with ideas and opinions more suited to some clever young man. . . . I instinctively...
Education
Alison Uttley
Alice Jane Taylor (later AU
) was a strong-willed child who set her own agenda. She later remembered a trial of wills, at the age of two, with her godmother, which ended not in her...
Education
John Strange Winter
After this she completed her education at home. Although even in this context she says, I was not well educated, for I never would learn,
Bainton, George, editor. The Art of Authorship. J. Clarke.
24
she also described herself as having always been from...
Education
Daisy Ashford
DA
's mother, Emma
, was an avid reader, and an unconventional amateur writer whose verses included brisk lines, slang, and knockabout humour.
Malcomson, R. M. Daisy Ashford: Her Life. Chatto & Windus.
53
She inscribed books that she gave away as gifts...
Education
Winifred Peck
It was probably Mary A. Marzials
' anthology Gems of English Poetry which made poetry the only lesson the Knoxes disliked. Winifred felt that Hemans
's boy on the burning deck cut a poor figure...
death
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
died in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, exactly 136 years after her grandfather Charles Dickens
was born.
Christodoulou, Glenn A. “The Grave of Mary Angela Dickens Rediscovered”. The Dickensian, Vol.
109
, No. 489, pp. 42-43.
42
Cultural formation
Adelaide Procter
AP
may have converted to Roman Catholicism
from Anglicanism by this date; certainly she had by 1851.
Sources conflict on the date of AP
's conversion, most of them dating it in 1851. Bessie Rayner Parkes
Cultural formation
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
was born into a large English family of writers and artists headed by her grandfather Charles Dickens
. Accounts of her life document her close relationships with several generations of paternal and maternal family...
Birth
Celia Moss
CM
was born at Portsea, a waterfront area of Portsmouth in Hampshire (where Charles Dickens
had been born a few years before her), the fourth in a family of twelve children.
“Jewish Encyclopedia”. JewishEncyclopedia.com.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Birth
Daisy Ashford
Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (who wrote as DA
) was born at Elm Lodge in Petersham, Surrey, a house once inhabited by Dickens
and now the home of her paternal grandmother and her aunt...
