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, 1992.
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, 1992.
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.
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
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
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
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
Fredrika Bremer
FB published her novel Grannarne, which was translated into English by Mary Howitt
as The Neighbours: A Story of Every Day Life, which appeared by November 1842.
The History of Nordic Women’s Literature. 2012, https://nordicwomensliterature.net/.
Asmundsson, Doris R. Fredrika Bremer in England. Columbia University, 1964.
Meredith, Louisa Anne. Our Wild Flowers. New Edition, Tilt and Bogue, 1843.
The title page sports an epigraph by Mary Howitt
, and the volume is illustrated with coloured plates from the author's original drawings.
Textual Production
Fredrika Bremer
FB published a novel entitled En dagbok, whose composition she had interrupted for her theological work. An anonymous English translation, first printed in the USA, joined several of her other titles in Smith's Standard...
Textual Production
Anna Mary Howitt
AMH
's first art commission was apparently the illustrations for her mother
's Hymns and Fireside Verses, executed in her early teens and published in 1839. After her death her mother's autobiography also appeared with her illustrations.
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press, 1952.
111
Textual Production
Sarah Josepha Hale
The original edition ran to just over nine hundred pages, and was illustrated with two hundred and thirty portrait wood engravings. SJH
dated her prefatory material at Philadelpha on 4 July 1851; a note added...
Textual Production
Fredrika Bremer
FB published her most famous novel, the feminist bildungsroman Hertha, eller En själs historia [the history of a soul], which Mary Howitt
translated into English as Hertha the same year.
The History of Nordic Women’s Literature. 2012, https://nordicwomensliterature.net/.
“NEW NOVEL, by the Author of ‘Alice Wentworth.’-Just ready, in”. The Times, No. 22395, 16 June 1856, p. 13, https://link-gale-com.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/apps/doc/CS218271440/TTDA?u=guel77241&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=d657e63b.
22395 (16 June 1856): 13
Textual Production
Fredrika Bremer
FB set her drama about rebellion and reconciliation, Trälinnan, in pre-Christian, Viking Scandinavia. An English version by Mary Lowell Putnam
was published before May 1844, and another by Mary Howitt
followed, both titled...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Ham
EH
anonymously contributed Mabel (a ghost story about a deaf girl) to an anthology, The Remembrance, edited by Thomas Roscoe
and dedicated to Queen Adelaide
.
This volume included contributions by herself, Bessie Rayner Parkes
, and Mary Howitt
, as well as two poems by the Rossettis: Christina
's A Royal Princess and Dante Gabriel
's Sudden Light. The...
Textual Production
Christian Isobel Johnstone
She included her own work, along with that of Gore
, Mitford
, Howitt
, Mrs Fraser
, and Catherine Crowe
. Several editions appeared, up to an eleventh in 1862.
