Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Thomas Hardy
-
Standard Name: Hardy, Thomas
TH
was a poet by vocation and became a novelist by profession. The Wessex of his novels has made him arguably a regional novelist. As well as a prolific output in both these forms, he published a unique verse epic bringing together human and supernatural characters, short fiction, a volume for children, and two volumes of actual autobiography masquerading as a biography by his second wife. Since his career as a publishing novelist ran from the 1870s to the 1890s, and his first volume of poetry post-dated his final novel, he has been seen as a Victorian novelist but a mostly twentieth-century poet. This description, however, is not true to the facts of composition. He wrote poetry from early in his life, but did not publish it in volume form until his final novel.
Acquainted with Andrew Lang
through her mother
's social circle, VH
shaped her own poetry under his influence. Partly because of Lang's connections, her romantic poem The Death of the Shameful Knight was published in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
Such earthy regionalists—who include Thomas Hardy
and D. H. Lawrence
, as well as Webb
and Kaye-Smith
—become the butt of SG
's satire in Cold Comfort Farm.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
VH
was fascinated by the mysterious throughout her life. As a small girl, she loved to listen to her mother talk about the White Lady, a spirit haunting the kitchen of Margaret Hunt
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Alice Munro
Carried Away begins with two lonely young people building an unlikely relationship by letter. Louisa, town librarian of Carstairs, Ontario, in 1917, lives in a hotel and eats her solitary meal each day with...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
As the work opens, Cordelia, slight of body, determined of will, savvy of mind
Gidez, Richard. P. D. James. Twayne.
56
(who is to reappear later in another book, The Skull Beneath the Skin), is running a seedy detective agency...
Intertextuality and Influence
Kathleen Jamie
In the third section the transcendental is a frequent presence. (Even in the first, Lepidoptery was about collecting, and pinning by the wings, not butterflies but angels.) Now in a number of markedly topical poems...
Intertextuality and Influence
W. H. Auden
While an undergraduate at Oxford (from October 1925) he discovered T. S. Eliot
, and was for a while obsessively modernist, as he had previously been traditional in the style of Thomas Hardy
. He...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lesley Storm
At last Peter confronts and questions Delia directly, and finds that he was indeed the Delia's rapist, though he remembers the encounter between them not as forced, but as mutual: a first bumbling, confused, frightened...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phyllis Bentley
The title, from Hardy
, carries connotations of blind, indifferent fate directing the course of human existence.
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Quin
In her short autobiographical article Leaving School—XI, AQ
mentions having been writing stories since the age of seven to entertain myself.
Quin, Ann. “Leaving School—XI”. London Magazine, Vol.
new series 6
, pp. 63-8.
64
Her urge to write was fostered by her discovery of Dostoyevsky
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
John Oliver Hobbes
Pearl Richards (later JOH
) read widely as a child and adolescent, and her parents' liberal views (and considerable fortune) meant that she could pursue her tastes in both the lending libraries and the less...
Who Was Who in Literature, 1906-1934. Gale Research.
vol. 1
She also belonged to the Society of Authors
, and acted as a steward (along with over a hundred other luminaries including Walter Besant
Leisure and Society
Lucas Malet
Schaffer writes that she re-invented herself by means of her change in appearance between 1892, when Thomas Hardy
found her tall and striking in looks and likeable in manner, and a decade later, when an...
Literary responses
Sheila Kaye-Smith
This novel brought critical and popular acclaim. SKS
said that the weeks following its appearance were some of the happiest of her life.
Walker, Dorothea. Sheila Kaye-Smith. Twayne.
85
The Times Literary Supplement notice began: No matter what fine work...
Literary responses
Charlotte Mew
May Sinclair
thought Madeleine magnificent, having depths & depths of passion & of sheer beauty.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
191
She also enjoyed the high Victorian melodrama of Mew's reading aloud.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.