Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Josephine Tey
-
Standard Name: Tey, Josephine
Birth Name: Elizabeth Mackintosh
Pseudonym: Gordon Daviot
Pseudonym: Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey
was the pseudonym that Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh used for her detective fiction, the genre for which she is now best known. Her other pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, was usually reserved for what she considered to be her more serious work: her drama, three non-mystery novels, and a biography. Tey's reputation as a detective novelist grew following her death in 1952, thanks especially to her revisionist history of Richard III
, The Daughter of Time, which has been credited for extending the boundaries of detective fiction. Her keen interest in history, and particularly in vindicating maligned or misrepresented figures, is evident throughout her writings.
She formed friendships around this time with other aspiring actresses, Esmé Wynne (who later, as Esmé Wynne-Tyson
, wrote plays, novels, and journalism, and who was always supportive of Smith's career) and Phyllis Morris
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dodie Smith
The idea for the play began with a request from playwright Gordon Daviot
(a.k.a. Josephine Tey), who wrote: Will you kindly go into winter-quarters and write a play with no one in it under thirty...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Rendell
The most improbable strand in this complex plot is derived from The Franchise Affair, 1948, by Josephine Tey
. In this novel (a favourite of Wexford's) a girl who has in fact been away...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
PDJ
followed the English tradition of detective-story writing that has continued from the 1920s and 1930s, a genre in which many women have held dominant positions. She spoke of her adolescent reading as influenced in...
Textual Features
Antonia Fraser
The Dictionary of Literary Biography calls Jemima Shore a new kind of woman detective.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
276
Her independence, intelligence, and literary sensibility are nothing new, but her rejection of marriage and her cheerful sexual promiscuity are...
Textual Production
Rosita Forbes
RF
's biography of a notorious seventeenth-century privateer (who became Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica) appeared first at New York as Henry Morgan
, Pirate in 1946, then at London as Sir Henry Morgan, Pirate and...
Textual Production
Antonia Fraser
AF
supplied introductions for The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, April 1975 (by various hands), the Trollope Society
's edition of Anthony Trollope
's Framley Parsonage, 1996, and the Folio Society
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
Waters took the idea for her plot from Josephine Tey
's The Franchise Affair, published in 1948. Setting out with the aim of exploring class tensions in the changing cultural landscape of post-war Britain...
Textual Production
Rosemary Sutcliff
Dundee began his distinguished military career as a scourge of the Covenanters
. It was cut short at the battle of Killiecrankie where he was championing James II
. His early death made him indelibly...
Timeline
25-26 June 1483: The child King Edward V was deposed, and...