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.
EE
's first publication consists of a fairly short essay with some poems to fill out the volume. She celebrates Scudéry as a Sappho
(one of Scudéry's strong female characters is Sapho) and as...
Textual Features
Mary Robinson
MR
writes as a friend to the Revolution, but enters with strong emotion into the personal situation of the queen
as the victim of scandal and prejudice. She cites Elizabeth I
and Cromwell
as examples...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Elstob
EE
's preliminary list of names suggests considerable research work: it includes several ancient or Anglo-Saxon women as well as Mary Astell
, Anne Bacon
, Katherine Chidley
(as the pamphlet antagonist of Thomas Edwards
Textual Features
Mary Hays
Though occasionally sketchy (it gives Elizabeth Elstob
, for instance, four lines), this is a work of real research, from a consistently feminist point of view. MH
investigates the question of women in power with...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Elstob
EE
's dedication to Queen Anne
asserts her awareness of being a female pioneer. Another part of her paratext, the preface, defends women's learning and defies both those who set up for Censurers and those...
Textual Features
Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
Textual Features
Mary Ann Cavendish Bradshaw
The novel consists largely of the personal histories of its (good) central characters, told severally in flashback. Maria's relates, with documents, how her father died young, leaving her co-heiress with her sister, while her violent-tempered...
Textual Features
Anna Eliza Bray
Owen, his wife Alice, and their children Rose and Edward are terrorized by Catholic tormentors.
Bray, Anna Eliza. The Novels and Romances of Anna Eliza Bray. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
3: 40
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 52
In the end, the family, their servant Abel Allen, and a blind boy are saved from...
Textual Features
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
One of this novel's topics is concealed identity (which results in repeated changes of name for several central characters). As the story opens, two men land at Dublin (which they find desolate, poverty-struck by the...
Textual Features
Penelope Aubin
PA
celebrates recent military victories, and praises Anne
for completing Queen Elizabeth
's work in assuring the strength of the Church of England
. She provides lavish panegyric for every Stuart monarch, as her ravish'd...
Textual Features
Josephine Tey
Like Richard of Bordeaux, this play follows the troubled career of a less-than-successful ruler and ends with a forced abdication. Daviot's realistic, balanced portrayal of Mary
went against conventional representations of the Queen as...
Textual Production
Dinah Mulock Craik
Dinah Mulock
published Elizabeth
and Victoria
: From a Woman's Point of View in the feminist Victoria Magazine.
Craik, Dinah Mulock. The Unkind Word and Other Stories. Hurst and Blackett.
68
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne.
134
Textual Production
Jean Plaidy
The next year, 1955, saw the publication of JP
's Tudor novel Gay Lord Robert, about Elizabeth I
and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester
(whose title was initially Lord Robert, since he was...
Textual Production
Bryher
Bryher published six other historical novels: The Player's Boy (1953, reprinted by the Paris Press
of Ashfield, Massachusetts: set in the reign of Elizabeth
and featuring a boy who plays women's parts on stage),...
Textual Production
Isa Craig
Annual Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science began to appear under IC
's editorship, including some of the earliest reports of women's public, modern political speech in Britain.
