Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charlotte Smith
-
Standard Name: Smith, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Turner
Married Name: Charlotte Smith
CS
, poet and novelist of the later eighteenth century, continued her output especially of children's books, into the very early nineteenth century. She wrote her poems for pleasure, her remarkable, now edited letters for relief from the struggles of a difficult life, but her novels (she said) only by necessity.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
996
Many of the latter have foreign settings, not for mere exoticism but to further a political critique which takes a global view. All her writing was done at high speed: she found it hard or impossible to make her income cover the unremitting expenses of her large dependent family. A critic has recently pronounced that the best of [her] writings . . . should be recognised as among the greatest works of the period.
Barrell, John. “To Stir up the People”. London Review of Books, Vol.
Her husband, Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer Lytton)
, was embarrassed by Cheveley, seeing himself in the portrait of Lord De Clifford and his predilection for governesses,
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press.
119
and tried to block the novel's production...
Reception
Adelaide O'Keeffe
The Monthly Review was on the whole complimentary. It judged the novel to be original and entertaining, though it complained of a few Hibernicisms and grammatical errors. It concentrated, oddly, on the Don Zulvago plot...
Residence
Mary Russell Mitford
The first period of poverty after his marriage caused him to move his family from Alresford in Hampshire. (MRM
later remembered the Hampshire countryside with warm affection, and delighted in its nearness to...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Textual Features
Anne Damer
With many suitors, Louisa would like permission to stay single, but she has a project for the conversion to Christianity of Mr Stanville, whom eventually she marries. (The similarity of this name to Stainville in...
Textual Features
Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe
's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy
, the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
Textual Features
Jane Warton
It seems that at least JW
's brother Joseph (whose published critique of Pope's poetry helped reshape literary opinion) was open to influence from her critical judgement; this raises at least the possibility that some...
Textual Features
Helena Wells
HW
says she has more respect for the upper classes than some of our modern reformists.
Wells, Helena. Letters on Subjects of Importance to the Happiness of Young Females. L. Peacock; W. Creech.
7
She recommends reading poetry and history, not novels: Novel reading tends to enervate the mind. We rise from...
Textual Features
Ann Gomersall
AG
is remarkable not only for extending the novel's range out of the gentry into the mercantile class, but also in differentiating between various types of businessmen, more and less admirable, and various different attitudes...
It opens with the title-poem of about 650 lines, The Old Manor House, which tells the tragic story of two young lovers, Guy and Margaret, who are kept apart because of the impossible circumstances...
Textual Features
Jane Harvey
The contents include descriptive and melancholy sonnets, satire, autobiography, and politics (including a poem on the horrors of slavery, addressed to William Wilberforce
, and another about the sorrow of a woman whose lover has...
Textual Features
Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
