Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
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Standard Name: Eliot, T. S.
Used Form: Thomas Stearns Eliot
TSE
, an American settled in England, was the dominant voice in English poetry during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as an immensely influential critic. His early experimental poems excel at catching an atmosphere or mood, often a moment of stasis and self-doubt. The Waste Land, a brilliant collage of fragments, has been seen to express the fears of a whole society about the threatened end of culture and amenity called civilization. After Eliot's conversion to Christianity his poetry moved to sombre investigations of the spiritual life: of time, fate, decision, guilt, and reconciliation. Meanwhile his criticism grappled with the the relation of past to present in terms of the contemporary relationship to tradition. TSE
also wrote lively comic verse, and in theatrical writing he moved on from pageant and historical religious drama to symbolic representation of spiritual issues through events in banal daily life.
When most women writers of her age were forgotten, the Countess of Pembroke retained a niche in literary history as a partner in the Sidneian psalms as well as the dedicatee of the Arcadia....
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
This notice struck Eliotas one of the two or three most intelligent reviews
he had had, and as quite extraordinary from someone who had seen the play but not yet had a chance...
Literary responses
Dorothy L. Sayers
Within Sayers's lifetime she had become a figure of controversy on account of the element of Christian partisanship in her non-fictional works. In The Emperor's Clothes, 1953, Kathleen Nott
bracketed Sayers with T. S. Eliot
Literary responses
Hope Mirrlees
Paris was received by an appreciative audience. Before its publication Virginia Woolf
described it as very obscure, indecent, and brilliant.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
2: 385
As Julia Briggs
observes, its readership remained strictly limited; [but] those, like T. S. Eliot
Literary responses
H. D.
T. S. Eliot
wrote that HD's versions of these choruses were allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than those of the then renowned scholar...
Literary responses
Jean Rhys
Critically, Rhys has been lauded as a modernist writer, a feminist writer, and, more recently, a postcolonial, Caribbean, or Creole writer. Biographer Carole Angier suggests that her preoccupation with exile was common in her time...
Literary responses
William Empson
The book was a resounding success, widely recommended by T. S. Eliot
in Britain and by John Crowe Ransom
in the USA.
Kermode, Frank. “The Savage Life”. London Review of Books, pp. 3-5.
3
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
The London theatre critics were scathing, with only two exceptions (though one of these, Harold Hobson
, carried a lot of weight). Pamela Hansford Johnson
trounced the play on the BBC
's radio programme The...
Literary responses
Marianne Moore
Eliot
assessed her in his introduction as the greatest living master of light rhyme, and as one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Her brother wrote of The...
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
H. G. Wells
, reviewing this work, wrote that DR
had probably carried impressionism in fiction to its furthest limit. He considered that her percepts never become concepts, and that her heroine is not a...
Literary responses
Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan
, however, applies a withering pen to WC
in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Literary responses
Cecily Mackworth
T. S. Eliot
, an early and appreciative reader of this book, invited the author to meet him over tea at his Faber and Faber
office in Russell Square. Mackworth, however, felt intimidated by...
Literary responses
Jo Shapcott
John Kinsella
's initial review called JS
as a great satirist and a virtuoso in meaning and verse movement, one who is doing no less than rewriting the English poetic canon—challenging sources, verse structure and...
Literary responses
Anne Ridler
AR
later judged that her dialogue was pretty good but her technical capacity unequal to her ambitious theme.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, p. 240 pp.
146
The play was well received on opening night and throughout its run; Eliot
was enthusiastic, and...
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
Though he had accepted it for publication, Eliot
had initially expressed little enthusiasm for this essay.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
3: 49
Hilary Mantel
, reading this essay while very ill herself, indignantly rejected what she saw as Woolf's...
