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.
Mary Elizabeth read early and voraciously, polishing off Anna Maria Hall
's three-volume Marian when she was only seven. By nine she was reading Scott
and Dickens
. One of the family servants introduced her...
Wealth and Poverty
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
She left a remarkably large estate for a Victorian woman writer. Despite the high style in which she lived, she was reportedly able from early in her career to save her literary earnings, since money...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
was encouraged to write from an early age, particularly by her mother. She would later recall how when she was eight and had just learned to write, her godfather bought her a beautiful brand...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
recalled the publisher's desire for a blend of the human interest and genial humour of Dickens
with the plot-weaving of G. W. M. Reynolds
.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth et al. “My First Novel”. The Trail of the Serpent, edited by Chris Willis and Chris Willis, Modern Library, 2003, pp. 415-27.
422
She indeed opens with a Dickensian flourish, conjuring...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Waters argues that MEB
ought not to be condemned for clichés that she herself helped to establish. Rather we should examine them and the genre of the detective or sensation novel as an index of...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
His article, Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon, which covered seven novels she had published since 1862, made a famous personal attack in asserting that her work evidenced familiarity with a very low type of female...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Despite its sensational plot and purple prose, MEB
's first attempt at infusing a touch of poetry and the subjective into her writing through character painting
qtd. in
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
161
does result in greater character development than in...
Education
Anita Brookner
AB
's father urged her to read Dickens
, for the purpose of understanding what the English were like, and also of understanding the unfairness of things.
qtd. in
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan, 1992.
5
She began reading Dickens at the age...
Textual Features
Anita Brookner
The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
The protagonist and first-person narrator, Zoë Cunningham, like other Brookner heroines, has difficulty extricating her own life from that of her widowed mother. In this case the mother, Anne, is twice widowed: Simon, whom she...
Textual Features
Frances Browne
This is often mistaken for FB
's own autobiography, but it is in fact a novel, narrated in the form of an autobiography by a boy named Frederick (alternately Frederic) Favoursham. Beginning My Share of...
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
Occupation
Sarah Harriet Burney
SHB
held her most glamorous and successful governess position, with the family of Lord Crewe (who also employed the parents of Charles Dickens
as butler and housekeeper).
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
xlvii, xlix
Allen, Michael. “Frances Anne Crewe”. Burney Letter, Vol.
12
, No. 2, 1 Sept.–30 Nov. 2006, pp. 9-10.
9
Textual Features
Sarah Harriet Burney
These letters show her to be a rewarding, informal, up-to-the-minute literary critic. She kept remarkably up to date on the topic of women's writing, showing herself consistently receptive to new styles and new ideas. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Josephine Butler
JB
's Appeal to the Women of America recounts the history of her involvement with the repeal campaign, as well as her reasons for shifting the focus of her energies from the campaign seeking higher...
