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.
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
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
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
161
does result in greater character development than in...
MEB
infused a touch of poetry more literally by frequent allusion to works by Tennyson
, including Mariana, The Deserted House, and The Lotos-Eaters. Her trademark use of other authors' texts as...
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. R. Bentley and Son.
45
a reference to Wood's family's financial loss which followed from the changes...
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
Isabella Bird
She used her royalties to buy boats for impoverished Scottish fishermen.
Kaye, Evelyn. Amazing Traveler, Isabella Bird: The Biography of a Victorian Adventurer. Blue Penguin Publications.
29-30
There were literary precedents for the kind of book IB
created on her return to England. Frances Trollope
had published in 1832 her...
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
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
Emma Jane Worboise
Each chapter begins with a religious epigraph. This novel recounts the story of the attractive nineteen-year-old bride, Lilian Grey, who makes a marriage above her social class with the aristocratic Basil Hope.
Worboise, Emma Jane. The Wife’s Trials; Married Life; Husbands and Wives. Garland.
Wife's Trials: 1-3, 9
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.
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
, pp. 28-37.
36
The names he mentions include actual...
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Alice Walker
The opening words of the title are quoted from June Jordan
. The opening words of the text, more surprisingly, come from Dickens
: It is the worst of times. It is the best of...
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.
O’Conor Eccles, Charlotte. Modern Men. Leadenhall Press.
