Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Queen Elizabeth I
-
Standard Name: Elizabeth I, Queen
Birth Name: Elizabeth Tudor
Royal Name: Elizabeth I
QEI
was a scholar by training and inclination (who wrote translations both as learning exercises and for recreation), as well as a writer in many genres and several languages. As monarch she wrote speeches, and all her life she wrote letters, poems, and prayers. (Some of these categories occasionally overlap.) Once her writing moved beyond the dutifulness of her youth, she had a pungent and forceful style both in prose and poetry.
LH
's opening address To my Children (probably written after the body of the work) describes John Hutchinson
's appearance and virtues—which, she writes, need no panegyric but will appear most glorious in a plain...
Textual Features
Claire Luckham
This episodic play traces the course of Anne Boleyn's relations with King Henry VIII
from 1526 to her execution on 19 May 1536, ending with news of this event. It focuses on the early years...
Textual Features
Leonora Carrington
The narrative is told in the first person to you, LC
's interlocutor Jeanne Megnen
, and divided into five journal or diary entries dated 23-27 August 1943. Across those entries LC
recounts her...
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Carola Oman
Her introduction disappointingly says nothing personal, nothing about Oman's association with Hertfordshire. It is in effect a biography, thorough and sometimes humorous, of Chauncy, taking in his forebears, descendants, and legal career. His topographical work...
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Jean Plaidy
This novel describes the years of Mary's imprisonment by Elizabeth
. Its plots, counterplots and torture, the desperate appeals written by its protagonist to potential supporters from her various dank prisons, are all over-shadowed by...
Textual Features
Clemence Dane
Will Shakespeare is written in blank verse, but does not imitate Elizabethan language. Subtitled an invention, the play dramatises Shakespeare
's early career as a writer, focusing on his move from Stratford to London...
Textual Features
Amelia Opie
Both in an Address to the Editor and in a series of explanatory footnotes, AO
positions herself on the one hand as a historian with a proper regard for available evidence, and on the other...
The first two volumes carried the story from Queen Elizabeth
's death to 1641.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press.
26
Textual Features
Simone de Beauvoir
SB
produces a treatise rather than a polemic, using a studied moderation of tone. She deploys an artful range of styles and her material is drawn from biology, history, sociology, economics, and in a large...
Textual Features
Elinor James
James's strong admonitory style has much in common with that of religious prophets. She is equally ready to cross swords with Quakers and Dissenters on the one hand and Catholics on the other, to venerate...
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Anne Grant
Leaving these images of militarism and turning back to Britain with Princess Charlotte
in mind, AGcast[s] a forward glance to hope again / Protracted blessings in a female reign,
Grant, Anne. Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown; J. Ballantyne.
48
looking to Charlotte to...
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Hilary Mantel
She is interested in hidden history, in apparently negligible people or objects whose historical significance is apparent only with hindsight, like the ginger-haired baby who would one day be known as Queen Elizabeth
or the...
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Sally Purcell
On a Cenotaph quotes a phrase from Baudelaire
's poem Lesbos: the shocking juxtaposition of a dead body with adoration in le cadavre adoré di Sapho
. Though SP
supplied notes to some things...
Textual Features
Charlotte Smith
In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia...
