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.
SG
's characters are amusing caricatures of socialites, intellectuals, and rustics. Flora's city friend, the modern young widow Mrs Smiling, for instance, has a large collection of suitors and an even larger collection of brassières...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
As a child SW
loved writing poems and stories, all entirely derivative from her reading of popular books like the Dr Who novelizations. In the sixth form at school she began to find the study...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
Intertextuality and Influence
May Sinclair
MS
's The Three Sisters appeared: a psychological/psychoanalytical novel which, although the sisters in question are not the BrontësEmily BrontëAnne Brontë
, seems to take its setting from that of their lives.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
108, 225-6
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
SW
puts in puts in something like a regular work day when writing, but keeps going to all hours when re-writing. Despite her success, she still finds the process largely torture. And yet [s]tarting...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Carson
The contents of this book include some that have become central to the Carson canon, like The Glass Essay, a poem of love and desire, loss and rejection, whose speaker survives the end of...
Intertextuality and Influence
May Sinclair
It is a ghost-story in which an archivist visiting a lonely house in Yorkshire sees an apparition of a non-existent crying child, in the manner of a famous episode in Emily Brontë
's Wuthering Heights.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
131ff
Intertextuality and Influence
Phyllis Bentley
PB
was deeply influenced by the Brontës
, whose home at Haworth was close to where she herself grew up in Halifax. As a daydreaming child she strongly identified with the Brontës
' imaginary worlds...
Health
Storm Jameson
SJ
's demanding work, travel, and personal commitments exacted a serious toll on her health. She contracted diphtheria as a young woman, probably when she nursed her son through it. Frequently exhausted, she also had...
Health
Dora Carrington
Carrington attempted to give herself a miscarriage by riding a horse violently, and when this did not work she became depressed to a nearly suicidal degree.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. John Murray.
As a child of about three she had terrible nightmares about people (nuns) who were running away from something, on fire and dying. She had dreadful dreams again at about seventeen, and then a recurrent...
Friends, Associates
Mary Taylor
Mary's descriptions of life abroad provided Charlotte Brontë
with what she described as a wish for wings,
Taylor, Mary. Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Brontë: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere. Editor Stevens, Joan, Auckland University Press; Oxford University Press.
22
and MT
successfully urged her and her sister Emily
to pursue their studies in Brussels; they...
Family and Intimate relationships
Emma Frances Brooke
It appears that EFB
had at least two sisters, and that they may have both been writers. An article written after EFB revealed her authorship of A Superfluous Woman quotes her still undiscovered biographer: There...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dora Sigerson
She had met him through Katharine Tynan, and they became engaged in September 1895 after a long courtship. Their loving marriage lasted the rest of Dora's life. They never had children.
