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.
This prompted Dickens
to proclaim there never was such a wrong-headed woman born—such a vain one—or such a Humbug.
Webb, Robert Kiefer. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. Columbia University Press, 1960.
347
The Athenæum reviewed the pamphlet harshly as an offence against taste and modesty, chastising HM
Literary responses
Patricia Wentworth
The Gazette awarded PW
a prize of 250 guineas for her work.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
77
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, remarked that the Dickens
of A Tale of Two Cities had...
Literary responses
Toni Morrison
Maureen Howard
in the New Republic discerned a new lightness and brilliance in this novel and called it, despite its elements of fantasy, a highly realistic novel, full of the actual riddles, the unanswerable questions...
Literary responses
Eliza Lynn Linton
Dickens
, editor of Household Words, judged her a reliable contributor, good for anything, although he acknowledged that her reputation for sexual explicitness might do the journal damage.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Dickens
described EG
's The Heart of John Middleton (December 1850) as a story of extraordinary power, worked out with a vigour and truthfulness that very few people could reach.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
253
Miller, Anita, and Elizabeth Gaskell. “Preface and Chronology”. My Lady Ludlow, Academy Chicago, 1995, pp. 7-10.
9
Literary responses
Harriett Jay
This novel fared badly at the hands of the Academy, which called it far from dull . . . even bright and easy, but fatally lack[ing] the strength and freshness we naturally expect from...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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
...
Occupation
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Frances Eleanor Ternan (later FET
), her sisters Maria
and Ellen
, and her mother Frances
, performed with Dickens
in Wilkie Collins
's The Frozen Deep, which opened at the New Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins, 1990.
786-8, 790
Occupation
Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
Pastimes at The Hoo included fox-hunting and an annual race-meeting, but also private theatricals (like those of Bulwer-Lytton at nearby Knebworth), for which BBBD
both wrote and performed. She also joined with Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Occupation
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
FMD
published fiction in magazines launched with his brother. The first of his major novels, Zapiski iz podpol'ia (Notes from Underground), appeared in 1864. That year marked his descent into poverty but also...
