Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sir Walter Scott
-
Standard Name: Scott, Sir Walter
Birth Name: Walter Scott
Titled: Sir Walter Scott
Nickname: The Great Unknown
Used Form: author of Kenilworth
The remarkable career of Walter Scott
began with a period as a Romantic poet (the leading Romantic poet in terms of popularity) before he went on to achieve even greater popularity as a novelist, particularly for his historical fiction and Scottish national tales. His well-earned fame in both these genres of fiction has tended to create the impression that he originated them, whereas in fact women novelists had preceded him in each.
A notebook surviving from GE
's schooldays contains (besides such items as poems copied from annuals) an essay on Affectation and Conceit, which sketches the character of a vain woman in a tone of...
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Margaret Forster
MF
published The Bride of Lowther Fell, A Romance: the word romance, echoing Sir Walter Scott
's The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), suggests the gothic, or rather the mock-gothic.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(23 October 1980): 15
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Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
expressed decorous dismay when her friend Sir Walter Scott
made public her authorship of the comic and outspoken ballad Ugly Meg.
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Carola Oman
CO
published her final biography, The Wizard of the North, The Life of Sir Walter Scott.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
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Mary Fortune
Although stories in Memoirs of an Australian Police Officer and Adventures of an Australian Mounted Trooper first appeared without attribution, a number of them were soon re-issued under his own name by James Skipp Borlase
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Vita Sackville-West
By the following year she was writing: not only a diary, and soon an extensive correspondence, but also poetry (not about adolescent feelings but about places and historical characters); long, romantic, historical novels in the...
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Lady Anne Barnard
The words were printed anonymously in the second edition of Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, edited by David Herd
, 1776. LAB
did not admit her authorship until 1823, when she confided her secret...
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Mary Russell Mitford
As early as 1824 MRM
was asking the advice of friends as to whether they thought she could be a novelist.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 29
She added one of her frequent disclaimers: I write merely for remuneration...
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George Eliot
Many early extant letters of GE
's date from her unhappy, adolescent, Evangelical period, and have a tone of self-righteousness and censoriousness of others and of herself which is not pleasant to modern readers. In...
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Joanna Baillie
JB
composed, at Hampstead, Lines on the Death of Sir Walter Scott.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
1: 478
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Lydia Maria Child
The story of her researching this book at the Boston Athenæum
is not quite accurate, since few of her borrowings from that institution were on the topic of slavery.
Clifford, Deborah Pickman. Crusader for Freedom. Beacon Press.
99
Her preface declares that a...
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Mary Brunton
She had nearly finished that part of the novel set in Scotland when in July that year Walter Scott
published Waverley. At first she thought she had better cancel her own Scottish scenes, but...
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Sarah Stickney Ellis
In her preface to the poem she outlines theories of poetry, taking much the same approach towards it that she had towards fiction: that verse, like prose, would benefit from attention to simple, everyday life...
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Joanna Baillie
She agreed to do this without payment, though Thomson gave her an Indian shawl when adding to his first request six years later.
Baillie, Joanna. “Introduction”. The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie, 1762-1851, edited by Jennifer Breen, Manchester University Press, pp. 1-25.
9, 11
Baillie at first demurred, claiming that her talents did not...
Textual Features
Sarah Green
The plot owes something to Charlotte Lennox
's Female Quixote. The father of Green's heroine has lived through many crazes for novelists: first Burney
, then Radcliffe
, then Owenson
, then Rosa Matilda
