Agnes Strickland

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Standard Name: Strickland, Agnes
Birth Name: Agnes Strickland
AS , writing in the middle nineteenth century, won renown as a historian and biographer, particularly of the British royal family and particularly of its female members. In fact all of these books were co-authored by her sister Elizabeth , who, however, preferred that their books should appear in Agnes's name alone. AS also wrote poetry, songs, children's books, and novels.
Works by other Strickland sisters, notably Catharine Parr Traill , are frequently misattributed to AS by library catalogues.
Photograph of a painting of Agnes Strickland by John Hayes, 1846. She is seated with her elbow resting on a wooden table. She is wearing a black velvet dress that laces at the front, over a cream coloured shirt that is trimmed with ruffles. Her sleeves are trimmed with cream coloured lace and pearls, and she is wearing a matching pearl bracelet. Her dark hair is curly, and partly pulled back. She holds a small paper scroll with early-period writing on it, and perhaps a seal. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Elizabeth Strickland
ES died; her death followed the year after that of her sister Agnes .
“Catharine Parr Traill - Chronology”. Library and Archives Canada: Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill.
Dedications Susanna Moodie
Susanna Moodie published her personal narrative Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada, dedicated to her sister Agnes Strickland , Author of the Lives of the Queens of England.
Moodie, Susanna, and Susan Glickman. Roughing It in the Bush. McClelland and Stewart, 1989.
v
In...
Education Ann Bridge
As a small child she stood out among the family for her quite exceptional naughtiness, which in later years she put down to surplus energy and dramatic ideas.
Bridge, Ann. A Family of Two Worlds. Macmillan, 1955.
141
When she began regular lessons, and...
Education Elinor Glyn
Since she abhorred her governesses, Elinor took her education into her own hands, reading every book she could in the library: Pepys 's diary, Cervantes ' Don Quixote (an eighteenth-century French version), Scott , Agnes
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Strickland
ES 's closest relationship in her family was that with her next sister, Agnes (1796-1874), together with whom she built her writing career. (From about mid-century if not earlier, their relationship was regularly disrupted by...
Family and Intimate relationships Susanna Moodie
Among SM 's five sisters, four became writers: Eliza or Elizabeth Strickland , Agnes Strickland (whose Lives of the Queens of England and other books were co-written with Elizabeth but bore her name alone), Jane Strickland
Family and Intimate relationships Catharine Parr Traill
Her sisters included the writers Agnes Strickland , Elizabeth Strickland , and Susanna Moodie . She shared a particularly close bond with Susanna, her fellow emigrant.
Gray, Charlotte. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Viking, 1999.
5, 212
Friends, Associates Eliza Lynn Linton
Eliza Lynn met a number of women authors who were once applauded but later complacently forgotten . . . . as literary fossils.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton, 1899.
85
She contended that Women who wrote were then few and far...
Friends, Associates Jane Porter
The Porters' mother lived a busy social life on limited means, and JP kept up this tradition. Sir Walter Scott was an early friend.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
265
When she moved to London, JP included among her friends...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Rigby
In London, she met theCarlyles and John Gibson Lockhart 's daughter Charlotte . She was also introduced to her future husband, Charles Eastlake . She called on Agnes Strickland and Maria Edgeworth . Lord Shaftesbury
Instructor Susanna Moodie
SM 's two elder sisters were well educated but the family could not afford a similar privilege for Catharine and Susanna, who were educated by their father and the elder sisters, Agnes and Elizabeth ....
Intertextuality and Influence Selina Bunbury
She drew chiefly on the histories written by George Cavendish and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger , and that in Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland 's Lives of the Queens of England.
Bunbury, Selina. The Star of the Court. Grant and Griffith, 1844.
vi
Intertextuality and Influence Winifred Peck
Her chapter-headings quote from Agnes Strickland and Edith Sitwell as well as an eclectic range of male authors from Homer onwards. Quotations abound in the text as well as the epigraphs, and not all of...
Intertextuality and Influence Jean Plaidy
The following eighty or so novels that she wrote under this pseudonym garnered her a wide following. Even before becoming Jean Plaidy she had studied the business aspect of authorship and had learned that whatever...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Howitt
In 1851 MH edited an illustrated volume of Biographical Sketches of the Queens of Great Britain from the Norman Conquest to The Reign of Victoria; or, Royal Book of Beauty; this followed in the...

Timeline

1831
Joseph Rickerby established himself as a printer and publisher at 3 Sherbourn Lane, London.
By 2 August 1856
Jane Margaret Strickland published a novel, Adonijah, a tale of the Jewish Dispersion; it was shortly attacked by George Eliot in Silly Novels by Lady Novelists as one of the deplorable types of fiction...
1861
A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...