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.
Little is known of CM
's education. Scholar Michael Galchinsky
(who later wrote of her for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) describes her family's household as secularizing . . . for their father...
Reception
Celia Moss
Galchinsky
suggests that in Westernising their tales the Mosses sought to engender greater sympathy from non-Jewish readers, a motive the Athenæum also acknowledges. Galchinsky argues further that the sisters' appropriation of the romance genre, in...
Education
Marion Moss
Little is known is about MM
's formal education. However, according to critic Michael Galchinsky
, her father entertained the family by reading romantic poetry as the women sat and sewed, including Byron
's Childe...
Intertextuality and Influence
Marion Moss
Written as a challenge to anti-Semitism, MM
's fiction is set in the remote past as a way of explaining Jewish history, religion, and customs to English readers in much the same way Scottexplained...
Literary responses
Henrietta Rouviere Mosse
George Saintsbury
found the title ridiculous and the novel worthy of the title. He blamed it for blocks of spiritless and commonplace historic narrative, and for such anachronisms the gentle and elegant heroine being educated...
Material Conditions of Writing
Iris Murdoch
Though she was a contented only child, IM
said that the impulse to create imaginary siblings was the thing that first inspired her to write. In her teens she was a leading contributor to the...
Textual Production
Sarojini Naidu
For SN
, writing began as an act of rebellion. She wrote her first poem at the age of eleven when she became frustrated with an algebra problem, and thereupon decided to become a poet....
Education
Elma Napier
In spite of the fact that her family did not value literature as much as games, and that her mother had specific ideas about what girls should read, EN
devoured every book she could get...
Textual Features
Adelaide O'Keeffe
AOK
's unusual historical novel, which appeared several years before anything comparable by Sydney Morgan
, Christian Isobel Johnstone
, or Sir Walter Scott
, seems to carry within itself the seeds of the national...
Textual Features
Margaret Oliphant
MO
attacks the sensation novel, a genre of fiction which she judges to be low in subject-matter (especially in its handling of sexual material), low in class connotations, and associated chiefly with women. Her idea...
Textual Features
Margaret Oliphant
This novel relates to her earlier Hester, 1883 and Joyce, 1888. Kirsteen's brutal father (who has been manager of a slave plantation, and goes as far as killing to impose his will on...
Textual Production
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.
This novel was an instantaneous success. Of the second edition the Critical Review (of May 1802) wrote: Seldom have we met with any combination of incidents, real or imaginary, which possessed more of the deeply...
