Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Hamilton
-
Standard Name: Hamilton, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Hamilton
Nickname: Eliza Hamilton
In her own day EH
was best known and loved for My Ain Fireside (a song expressive of national Scottish feeling and the glorification of the domestic) and for Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1808, a novel of domestic improvement. In later generations her satire on the Jacobins has got her type-cast as an unmitigated conservative. In fact her writings in many genres (poems, novels, essays, biography, and writings on education, religion, and philosophy) combine a scholarly and an ironic bent, and her conservatism includes a strong streak of feminism. Her novels make less use than most of the marriage plot, and she presents single women as strong and admirable.
The orphan hero, Theodore, is brought up among a collection of intellectual eccentrics, reminiscent of such satirical novels as those of Elizabeth Hamilton
.
Textual Features
Sarah Green
The novel itself has elements of a spoof on the gothic, a didactic courtship plot, a social satire of the dialogue kind associated with Elizabeth Hamilton
and Thomas Love Peacock
, a sentimental melodrama, a...
Textual Features
Mary Hays
The plot follows the life-stories of two sisters (somewhat crudely distinguished for worldly selfishness on the one hand and prudent, generous sincerity on the other) and their brother, who is a spendthrift like his frivolous...
Textual Features
Lady Eleanor Butler
Particularly worthy of mention is a jaunty, witty, perceptive Hymn to Diana, which addresses the goddess of chastity in the manner of a litany, with a string of petitions. Since Diana has decreed, says...
Textual Features
Medora Gordon Byron
The fictional spinster here finds Miss Byron's bachelor sympathetic but querulous, and decides to make clear by a parallel account that unmarried women are not like that. I declare, on the honour of a...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Helme
The work includes an account of the Hottentots (in whose society all are equal, without distinction of rank, and where marriages are made for as long as the two parties shall be content with the...
Textual Features
Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
's letters to Scott
show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Textual Features
May Laffan
In this novel ML
returns to the controversy of Irish Home Rule so thoroughly treated in Hogan, M.P., putting criticisms of it into the mouths of middle-class, Protestant Irish residents. The attorney Mr Perry...
Textual Features
Mary Leadbeater
Despite her didactic intention, and although she provides useful recipies and information on herbal medicine, ML
shows none of the condescension of analogous works like Elizabeth Hamilton
's Cottagers of Glenburnie. The dialogues are...
Reception
Maria Edgeworth
Scholarly and critical work on her ever since Marilyn Butler
's literary biography, 1972, has amassed a significant body of new understanding. In 2009 Susan Egenolf
discussed her work in political fiction along with some...
Hutton, Catherine. Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century. Editor Beale, Catherine Hutton, Cornish Brothers.
159
Publishing
Maria Edgeworth
From early in her publishing career ME
sent out into the world short pieces as well as longer ones and collections of her own. In this way she placed stories in miscellaneous volumes (The...
Occupation
Catherine Hutton
As well as collecting illustrations of costume, CH
was an early collector of autographs. (She began both these collections at a young age, but presumably had to start again from scratch after her losses in...
Literary responses
Jane Austen
Some Austen news items are regrettable. In an interview with the Royal Geographical Society
in June 2011, V.S. Naipaul
, in asserting his own superiority to women writers (and claiming he could tell male from...
