Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Samuel Beckett
-
Standard Name: Beckett, Samuel
SB
, Irish expatriate poet, short-story writer, novelist, and playwright, was a major force in international twentieth-century writing and especially theatre. He wrote a high proportion of his works in French, usually doing the translations into English himself. His increasingly death-obsessed absurdity and minimalism are combined with an invincible energy of language, even while the text appears to despair of the efficacy of words.
Samuel Beckett
, hearing of the news in Paris, remarked to Sylvia Beach
: I . . . shall think of her when I think of goodness.
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking.
455
Having dedicated her life to English...
Textual Production
Sylvia Townsend Warner
This was one of The Dolphin Books published by Chatto and Windus
, a series including works by T. F. Powys
(The Only Penitent) and Samuel Beckett
(Proust).
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. “Editorial Materials”. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Carcanet New Press, pp. xi - xxiii; 275.
280
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Michelene Wandor
In its original form, says Greenhalgh, this book reflects MW
's roles as playwright, reviewer, and Leavisite
student of English literature.
Greenhalgh, Susanne. “A Review of <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender</span> by Michelene Wandor”. Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.
13
, No. 1, pp. 125-6.
125
The revised form considers the impact of feminism, socialism, and changing concepts of...
Publishing
Julia Strachey
JS
also wrote creatively for the New Statesman, and was commissioned to write critically on Samuel Beckett
for The Spectator in 1957.
Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown.
189, 252
Textual Production
Zadie Smith
She titled two successive articles in the Guardian in January 2007 Fail Better and Read Better, remembering Samuel Beckett
's Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better (from Worstward Ho, 1983).
Textual Production
Gladys Henrietta Schütze
GHS
(as Henrietta Leslie) entitled her autobiography (in a defiantly optimistic reversal of a proverbial phrase) More Ha'Pence Than Kicks.
OCLC lists an edition published in 1900 as held by five libraries in...
AQ
published a handful of short stories and articles in various journals, including Nova, the London Magazine, transatlantic review, and Antigonish Review.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Sewell, Brocard, and Colin Wilson. Like Black Swans: Some People and Themes. Tabb House.
186
In the mid-sixties she told her publisher,...
Occupation
Harold Pinter
He acted for this company for a year and learned a lot. He worked his way up in Shakespearean
roles from bit parts to major ones and discovered the writings of Samuel Beckett
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Occupation
Harold Pinter
Always keen on acting, HP
played the solo protagonist of Beckett
's Krapp's Last Tape in a wheelchair at the Royal Court Upstairs
, in a run that began on 14 October 2006 (because an...
Literary responses
Harold Pinter
Peter Hall
, its first director, likened the play to Mozart
's music for its precision, lyricism, and sudden descents into pain which are quickly over because of a healthy sense of the ridiculous.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Samuel Beckett
Residence
Edna O'Brien
Her cluttered writing room has an arbutus desk, books (many of them signed gifts from their authors), candles, paintings, the faded and fraying tapesty carpet, and images of James Joyce
and Samuel Beckett
presiding at...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna O'Brien
EOB
uses books as presiding spirits of her own writing. James Joyce
's image is at one end of the mantelpiece and Samuel Beckett
's at the other. . . . I write by hand...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Textual Production
Ella K. Maillart
A travel book by EKM
(composed in French and first published as Oasis interdites: de Pékin au Cachemire) appeared in English as Forbidden Journey: From Peking to Kashmir, translated by Thomas McGreevy
...
Timeline
1949: John Calder (Publishers) Limited was founded...
1955: Copies of Molloy by Samuel Beckett and Lolita...
Writing climate item
1955
Copies of Molloy by Samuel Beckett
and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
(both published in France) were seized by British Customs.
By early November 1973: Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson prefaced...
Writing climate item
By early November 1973
Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson
prefaced his short-story volume Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs? with a polemical critique listing only sixteen serious contemporary British writers.
Texts
Beckett, Samuel. Come and go: dramaticule. Calder and Boyars, 1967.
Beckett, Samuel. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Black Cat, 1992.
Beckett, Samuel. En attendant Godot. Editions de Minuit, 1952.
Beckett, Samuel. Fin de Partie. Editions de Minuit, 1957.
Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. Grove Press, 1961.
Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape. Faber and Faber, 1958.
Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Editions de Minuit, 1951.
Beckett, Samuel. More Pricks Than Kicks. Chatto and Windus, 1934.
