Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Emily Brontë
-
Standard Name: Brontë, Emily
Birth Name: Emily Brontë
Pseudonym: Ellis Bell
Used Form: Emily Bronte
Used Form: Two
Emily Brontë
collaborated with her siblings on a body of juvenilia, and by herself wrote a small number of poems and a single surviving novel. Wuthering Heights is established as one of the most original and disturbing novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Its compelling imagery, sophisticated narrative technique, and powerful, indeed violent, story—part ghost story, part romance, part anatomy of social hierarchies and cultural conflict—details the enmity between two families on the Yorkshire moors that erupts when a strange child is adopted into one of them, and which is only resolved in the subsequent generation.
Their friendship was at first somewhat shaky, but warmed considerably. Writing in her diary on 6 June 1918, Woolf described DC
as such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Brontë
The close of the year 1848 was terrible for AB
. Her sister Emily
died of consumption on 19 December, as had Branwell
in September.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
576
Family and Intimate relationships
Vernon Lee
The women's relationship began with (and was sustained by) their shared love of literature. Mary dedicated some poems in her A Handful of Honeysuckle to Violet, and regularly stayed with her in Italy, as...
Family and Intimate relationships
Margaret Drabble
MD
's father, barrister John Frederick Drabble
, also attended Cambridge
, and served in the RAF
during the second world war. In 1945, newly demobbed, he stood as Labour
candidate for the Tory seat...
Education
Jackie Kay
In her early years at school in Glasgow, JK
had problems with bullies who taunted her because of her skin colour. She retaliated privately by writing little poems of revenge.
“Writer’s ’revenge’ on school bullies”. BBC News.
At school she was...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
LMM
attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College
in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Education
Anita Desai
Anita grew up with Urdu poetry and literature, but her nursery rhymes were German. Her father did not pass Bengali on to his children.
When at the age of nine she read Emily BrontëWuthering Heights...
Education
Jean Plaidy
Eleanor Alice Burford (later JP
) learned how to read at four years old: I do feel that books were my thing, right from the word go, she told an interviewer in 1991.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
She...
Education
Mary Gawthorpe
Apprenticeship included some part-time attendance at the Pupil-Teacher Centre
in the LeedsSchool Board
offices. There MG
continued with largely the same subjects as at school, with the addition of French, educational theory, psychology, and...
Education
Agatha Christie
By the time Agatha was born, Clara Miller
believed that girls ought not to learn to read before the age of eight. Defiantly, Agatha taught herself to read at five. She eagerly devoured Lewis Carroll
Education
Jean Rhys
At a very young age, JR
imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...
Education
H. D.
HD's father encouraged her education, although he refused to allow her to attend art school. Instead, she was encouraged to study mathematics and was tutored by her brother Eric
. Eric also provided his sister...
Education
Flora Macdonald Mayor
Although FMM
's father was, for the most part, more concerned with her fragile health than her academic development, the twin sisters received some home-schooling from their mother to quite a high level, since she...
Education
Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters
, Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield
and Gertrude Stein
. Isak Dinesen
was to come later.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
