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.
CM
's manuscripts of poems and short stories and her unpublished letters are held in the British Library
and in the Lockwood Memorial Library at SUNY Buffalo
. The librarians at Buffalo are said to...
MacKenzie, Raymond N. A Critical Biography of English Novelist Viola Meynell, 1885-1956. Edwin Mellen.
61, 65
Literary responses
Viola Meynell
Alice Meynell
initially felt that the book was too personal and outspoken. She asked Viola to lessen and modify and veil the detailed and repeated record of caresses, and added: These are things that are...
Literary responses
Edna St Vincent Millay
Thomas Hardy
(as reported by Elinor Wylie
) is believed to have said her poems were one of the only two great things in the United States, the other being the skyscraper.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
xiii, 290
To...
Literary responses
Toni Morrison
Maureen Howard
in the New Republic discerned a new lightness and brilliance in this novel and called it, despite its elements of fantasy, a highly realistic novel, full of the actual riddles, the unanswerable questions...
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...
Publishing
Margaret Oliphant
Blackwood's published MO
's The Anti-Marriage League, a critique of Thomas Hardy
's Jude the Obscure.
Greenfield, John R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 159. Gale Research.
159: 254
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
116
Textual Features
Louise Page
The story is of local interest. The eighteenth-century protagonist, Francis Herries, moves his family from Doncaster to a crumbling manor house in Borrowdale, home of a reputed witch. He also defies social rules by...
Family and Intimate relationships
Adelaide Procter
AP
's mother, born Anne Skepper
, was a clever and observant woman, a frequent and influential hostess to the London literary elite. Frances Kemble
considered her notable for her pungent epigrams and brilliant sallies...
Education
Ann Quin
Yet at this time books discovered in the public library taught her the possibilities in writing: Greek and Elizabethan dramatists. Dostoievsky (Crime and Punishment and Virginia Woolf
's The Waves . ....
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...
Education
Joan Riley
As a young child in Jamaica, JR
says she found escape from the harsh realities of her life on the shelves of the local library. Reading whatever was available, she ranged from Shakespeare
to...
Friends, Associates
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
lived with the Stephens
after their marriage, and while there became a friend of such literary figures as George Meredith
, Henry James
(who described her after an early encounter as exquisitely irrational)...