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.
Scott
confided to Joanna Baillie
after AS
's death that he had developed a most unsentimental horror for her sentimental letters while he was receiving them.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
Beatrice Webb
called this novel the most useful bit of work that has been done for many a long day. You have managed to give the arguments for and against factory legislation and a fixed...
Literary responses
Margaret Holford
She was very disappointed when Scott never acknowledged this tribute. After Wallace appeared, Joanna Baillie
wrote to him reminding him of this lapse in manners and implicitly that it was his own fault that Wallace...
Literary responses
Catherine Fanshawe
CF
's immediately posthumous reputation rested, like her writings themselves, on oral tradition. She had the admiration of William Cowper
and Walter Scott
, as well as Joanna Baillie
, Anne Grant
, and Mary Berry
Literary responses
Alison Cockburn
Burns
reflected the influence of Cockburn's I've seen the smiling of Fortune beguiling in one of his earliest compositions, I dream'd I lay where flowers were springing (first published in 1788).
Fordonski, Krzysztof. “Robert Burns and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski: A Translatological Investigation into the Mystery of ’I dream’d I lay’”. Scottish Literary Review, Vol.
5
, No. 1, pp. 13-29.
16, 26
Walter Scott
Literary responses
Margaret Holford
Walter Scott
never answered when Holford sent him a copy of Wallace for comment, and was apparently scathing about the poem in remarks made privately to Joanna Baillie.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
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...
Literary Setting
Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes and very slightly alters four lines from Pope
beginning What gay ideas crowd the vacant brain,
Gore, Catherine. Mothers and Daughters. Bentley.
title-page
but whereas Pope's imaginary Teresa Blount
was daydreaming idly and innocently of the dukes and...
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...
names
Joanna Baillie
Walter Scott
teased her about her taking up in her fifties the style of Mrs. (This had earlier been universal for older unmarried women, as a mark of respect; it was now becoming limited...
Occupation
Elizabeth Siddal
After this show, Siddal's illustration of Scott
's Clerk Saunders was part of an exhibition that toured the United States; beyond these two instances, her work was never exhibited in her lifetime. Charles Eliot Norton
Occupation
Barbara Pym
This work gave her considerable free time, most of which she spent reading such authors as Austen
, Johnson
, Scott
, and Trollope
. She particularly admired the forms of Mansfield
's published scrapbook...
Occupation
Caroline Scott
CS
became a painter and musician of some accomplishment. According to Lady Louisa Stuart
she called her drawings dark-coloured, [her] music touching, and [her] style pathetic.
Stuart, Lady Louisa, and J. Steven Watson. Memoire of Frances, Lady Douglas. Editor Rubenstein, Jill, Scottish Academic Press.
100
Three years before she was married she produced...
Occupation
Anne Bannerman
AB
was instrumental in securing the papers of John Leyden
(linguist, poet, and friend of Walter Scott
, with whom she had had some kind of close relationship) for the use of James Morton
...
Occupation
Fanny Kemble
She toured England, Scotland, and Ireland with the Covent Garden Theatre
company, met Walter Scott
, and was feted by Lady Morgan
in Dublin.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
