Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sir Walter Scott
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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.
In a critical preface HS
reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford
or Edward Bulwer Lytton
). The two groups of lovers and...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Eliot
As she moved on intellectually from her religious youth, she became steeped in the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and increasingly interested in alternative explanatory systems, particularly those of social science—including Herbert Spencer
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Harriet Burney
Lorna J. Clark, editor of SHB
's letters, notes the abundant portrayal in her novels of dysfunctional families.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
But then Guy goes to sleep in his study (known as the Knights' room), and finds himself sent back seven hundred years to 1196. Here he is woefully out of place, still being clad in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sophia Lee
The Recess was highly influential: in its basic technique of inserting fictive persons among actual historical ones, in its polarization of Elizabeth
and Mary
, and in its heavily sentimental tone. Writers directly influenced by...
Those aspects of the book which readers insisted on seeing separately as the Jewish element, as she herself called them, were the hardest for GE
to write. She sought to naturalize the scholarly, Judaic...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
The book opens with Stella's unhappy childhood, living an isolated, transient life in Continental Europe with her grandmother, Mrs Jodrell, who has fallen out with both her children, and whom Stella has to tend on...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
LEL recalled devising poetry during her early childhood in East Barnet, where she moved at the age of seven: I cannot remember the time when composition in some shape or other was not a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Holford
Margaret Holford the younger
scored her greatest success with her anonymous: Wallace
, or, The Fight of Falkirk, a historical verse romance inspired by Walter Scott
's Marmion, 1808.
The title-page quotes Burns
and Scott
. The preface remarks that books based on female impressions of national manners and moral character have succeeded in the past.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Sketches of the Present Manners, Customs, and Scenery of Scotland. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
prelims iv
The book is again made up...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Spence's title-page bears a quotation from James Cririe
, a little-known Scots poet whom Burns had praised (and whom she cites several times later in her text). Perhaps for the sake of her original audience...
Intertextuality and Influence
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth B. Lester
Its title-page quotes from Akenside
, but the tutelary genius of the novel is Shakespeare
, several of whose plays have left their mark on it. The story opens (recalling two of Mrs Ross
's...
