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.
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...
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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...
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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...
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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 Features
Lucy Hutchinson
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...
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Norah Lofts
The title flags the controversies surrounding its subject: Anne's marriage gave her her place in history, but according to this novel the king did not have marriage in his mind when he began his pursuit...
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Antonia Fraser
AF
says in her Author's Note that it occurred to her while she was working on Oliver Cromwell
that women during the English Civil War would make a more interesting subject. She divides her book...
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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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...
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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
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...
