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.
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 Production
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
took a keen interest in the reputations of women writers. She planned in 1821 to write an essay on Miss Austen
's novels, which are by no means valued as they deserve
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 357
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Literary responses
Caroline Norton
The pamphlet was not well received: the public appeared to be suffering from compassion fatigue. In opposing CN
's plan of writing to the Times, Melbourne
called her a sobbing, moaning, and complaining woman...
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...
Literary responses
Amelia Opie
The Critical Review introduced its laudatory notice by praising the current standard of women's poetry (a tradition, it says, less than a century old). It invokes the canonical names of Seward
, Barbauld
, and...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eliza Parsons
Her next child, Mary, was baptised in Plymouth on 30 April 1762, and a son, William, on 13 February 1765. In all she had eight children, five daughters and three sons. All of the sons...
Textual Production
Eliza Parsons
She gave her name as Mrs. Parsons on the title-page and signed the dedication with both her names.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 512
A title-page epigraph reads: Brutus said Virtue was but a name—tis more. ....
Intertextuality and Influence
Mrs F. C. Patrick
The narrative is at first somewhat flat-footed in its insistence that this is not a novel, but it acquires further flavour whenever the old gentleman telling it becomes self-referential. His daughter, he says, acts the...
Reception
Anne Plumptre
Antoinette was well reviewed. The Critical hailed a novel which neither endangered its readers' morals nor bored them with constant moralising. It dropped hints about the author's identity which amounted to puffing, saying it believed...
Travel
Ann Radcliffe
Within a month or so they were off again, to the English Lake District, visiting their relations in the north on the way (AR
's parents were now settled in Chesterfield). This...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
The heroine, Adeline, is not merely a poet but also a genius. Her poems are interspersed in the narrative, which is the earliest example of the mature Radcliffe formula with the typical Radcliffe villain, Phillipe...
Literary responses
Ann Radcliffe
The Italian won for AR
the accolade of praise from Thomas James Matthias
, scholar, editor, and librarian at Buckingham Palace, who invoked the shade of Ariosto
to honour her in the same place...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
Influences on AR
's writings include the opera, contemporary travel writers, and Joseph Priestley
's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
67
AR
probably helped to produce the fashion for literary quotation...
Wealth and Poverty
Mary Ann Radcliffe
At first MAR
's money was tied up in a trust, so that her husband had no access to it, but this situation did not last. Her family life began in poverty and became worse...
