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.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
149
Charles Dickens
reported the story that her attack of madness culminated in her walking down her own street in Edinburgh, not only stark mad but stark naked...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ellen Wood
Charles Wood
states that Mildred Arkell seeks to address the hopelessness that fell upon so many when the ports were opened:
Wood, C. W. Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood. Third, R. Bentley and Son, 1895.
45
a reference to Wood's family's financial loss which followed from the changes...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Smythies
This opens on Christmas Eve, with London under snow, looking like the great sinner that she is, doing penance, as she ought to do, in a white sheet,
Smythies, Harriet. Left to Themselves. Hurst and Blackett, 1863, 3 vols.
1: 3
with two poverty-stricken boys of...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Paston
At the beginning of the play, the generation gap is marked by Dickens
's Old Curiosity Shop: while the parents dissolve in tears, their daughter cries out with embarrassment, Silly old Dickens again! You...
On the glamorous idea of touring with a show in Europe, MA
writes that her images of London came from Dickens
and Winston Churchill
, her images of Paris from Guy de Maupassant
, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Her influence on Virginia Woolf
is incalculable. ATR
was a model from within the Stephen family of an independent and money-earning woman writer. Her prose, in particular the impressionistic imagery and associative diction of her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Like her first novel to see print, Gee says, this one took seven years to find a publisher. Speaking about it at a date fairly early in its long quest for print, she mentioned that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles
COCE
headed her book with two lines from Thomas Campion
: Alas, poor book . . . go spread thy papery wings. / Thy lightness cannot help or hurt my fame.
qtd. in
O’Conor Eccles, Charlotte. Modern Men. Leadenhall Press, 1887.
prelims
She walks a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
In the capacity of the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor, AS
delivered four lectures to students of European Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford
. Considering her stated dislike of lecturing from her days at Strathclyde
Intertextuality and Influence
Ethel Wilson
The two stories share an epigraph from Charles Dickens
' Bleak House: Now, my young friends, [said Mr. Chadband] what is this Terewth. . . firstly (in a spirit of love) what is the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
In an extraordinary passage near the end of the book, Cecil lists a number of people who might, if they could only work together, revolutionize the country.
qtd. in
Farrell, John P. “Toward a New History of Fiction: The Wolff Collection and the Example of Mrs. Gore”. The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, Vol.
37
, 1986, pp. 28-37.
36
The names he mentions include actual...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
