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.
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott
, George Eliot
, and Charles Dickens
), it nonetheless has...
Literary responses
May Laffan
In 1883 The Cabinet of Irish Literature declared that ML
exposed the shams and narrownesses that deface the society of Ireland, and that her writings . . . mark unquestionably a new era in...
Literary responses
Edna Lyall
In 1912 Virginia Woolf
, reviewing a book about Dickens, remarked how in country inns on a wet weekend the walker frustrated by the weather would find on the single bookshelf just two authors: Dickens
Literary responses
Jane Gardam
JG
continued to attract prizes in her new genre. This work was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 won the Baudelaire Prize in France.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
JG
's father's response to her Booker short-listing...
Literary responses
Queen Victoria
Despite her book's popularity, when Victoria entered the arena of public writing, some Victorians criticized her prose style. After receiving copies of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, sent by...
Literary responses
Amelia B. Edwards
John Cordy Jeaffreson
paid this novel the compliment of a three-column Athenæum review. He predicted eventual success as a novelist for its author, even though he found grave faults in her present production. ABE
...
Literary Setting
Julia Frankau
This melodramatic story pits evil woman against ideal woman, while its male characters are more mixed. JF
remains in control of her melodramatic plot and sometimes deliberately purple style: she succeeds in her business of...
Literary Setting
E. Nesbit
This book shows the influence of Dickens
in its use of disguise, its elaborate plot and wide range of settings (all known at first hand to EN
, including Derbyshire, where she had been...
Material Conditions of Writing
Mary Angela Dickens
The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD
's grandfather
and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...
Material Conditions of Writing
Iris Murdoch
Though she was a contented only child, IM
said that the impulse to create imaginary siblings was the thing that first inspired her to write. In her teens she was a leading contributor to the...
names
Edna Lyall
BirthName: Ada Ellen Bayly
She was named Ada after the beautiful and idealistic Ada of Dickens
's Bleak House.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co., 1904.
4
Nickname: Ellie
This family nickname was another literary reference: to The Wide Wide World...
Occupation
Mary Cowden Clarke
A production of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Charles Dickens
's Amateur Company
opened at the Haymarket Theatre
, with MCC
as Mistress Quickly, wearing Elizabethan costume she had made herself.
Clarke, Mary Cowden. My Long Life. Dodd, Mead, 1896.
136-7
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
Occupation
Edna St Vincent Millay
ESVM
now cast around for work, possibly on stage. She sent out poems to magazines, often fruitlessly. She earned a little by acting with the Provincetown Players
from December 1917, building on her long experience...
Occupation
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866. This highly controversial collection, following closely on the heels of two successful plays, firmly established his literary reputation. He published an illustrated book of literary criticism, William Blake
...
