Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Howitt
-
Standard Name: Howitt, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Botham
Married Name: Mary Howitt
Pseudonym: Wilfreda
Between them, Mary Howitt
and her husband William
wrote and published over 180 books. Hers alone, at her death, occupied forty pages of the British Museum
printed catalogue.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
1, 261
Bearing the expenses of a large family, they needed to harness their literary productivity to earning potential.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
1, 134-5
As an opportunistic writer in several low-status, low-cost genres, accustomed to placing the same work in several successive venues, MH
left a complex, even confusing bibliography, not yet reduced to order by scholars.
Through a contact of Mary Howitt
, EG
published a number of stories in the AmericanSartain's Union Magazine, including one of English domestic life entitled The Last Generation in England, that appeared...
Publishing
Christina Rossetti
In the four months following the end of her engagement to James Collinson
no new poems were entered in her notebook, but the broken engagement was not necessarily the cause, since there are several other...
Publishing
Eliza Meteyard
It was her earnings from this book, said Mary Howitt
, that served to set up a younger brother in Australia.
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press.
188
Publishing
Eliza Meteyard
She had formed the intention to write it in 1850, and was later helped by the loan of a huge haul of manuscripts.
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press.
181
Mary
and William Howitt
helped her secure a generous £1,000 from...
Reception
L. E. L.
Although LEL died on the cusp of the Victorian period, she was widely read in its early years, and was invoked explicitly by many other writers who followed her, including women poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Lightbown, Ronald W., and Eliza Meteyard. “Introduction”. The Life of Josiah Wedgwood, Cornmarket Press.
Reception
Elizabeth Gaskell
Around the time of Ruth's appearance, Swedish novelist and feminist Fredrika Bremer
(who was probably introduced to EG
by William
and Mary Howitt
) wrote: Dear Elizabeth, dear sister in spirit, if I may...
Residence
Eliza Meteyard
On 26 June 1848 she wrote to Leigh Hunt
from (apparently) Lamb Street in Spitalfields. For some years her home was the house of Margaret Gillies
(a successful artist, portraitist, and feminist, who lived...
Textual Features
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
's selection, though, demonstrates a serious interest in women's literary and feminist history. Of the selections whose authors can be identified, almost half are women. Though Marguerite, Lady Blessington
, doyenne of the albums...
Textual Features
Christian Isobel Johnstone
Johnstone's Edinburgh Magazine was heavily political in content, while Tait's was designed to have greater appeal to the general reader.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Between 1832 and 1846 (when she retired) CIJ
contributed over four hundred articles to the...
Textual Features
Amelia B. Edwards
The pieces are, as the author notes, mostly short pieces designed for music, and suitable for drawing-room performance. Several are translated or adapted from French; many have male speakers, as Euridice is a dramatic monologue...
Textual Production
Mary Russell Mitford
Mitford sought to secure a review from either Mary
or William Howitt
, but Mary replied that reviews had already appeared in the journals they had links with. Another friend, Barbara Hofland
, reviewed it...
Textual Production
Georgina Munro
GM
published in The People's Journal (later The People's and Howitt's Journal) over the whole of its run; her sixteen contributions are mainly short stories.
The People's Journal began in 1846 and Howitt
's...
Textual Production
Harriet Martineau
It was dated 1851. Her biographer R. K. Webb
claims that the bulk of the book is Atkinson
's, with promptings from Harriet Martineau
, although it certainly also includes substantial letters from her.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
