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.
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 Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender by Michelene Wandor”. Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.
13
, No. 1, 2003, pp. 125-6.
125
The revised form considers the impact of feminism, socialism, and changing concepts of...
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
Anne Carson
The angle-bracket in the title is an accident which Carson made permanent: the name, she says, which her computer gave to her draft. Another technical glitch accounts for the fact that [m]ost of the text...
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...
Textual Production
Nancy Cunard
The book, published by NC
's Hours Press
, included poems by Richard Aldington
and Samuel Beckett
and had a photomontage cover designed by Man Ray
.
Chisholm, Anne. Nancy Cunard. Knopf, 1979.
154
Textual Production
Nancy Cunard
The original book was 855 pages long; it measured twelve inches by ten and half; it was two inches thick; it weighed eight pounds. The title, NEGRO, ran diagonally in large red capitals across...
Textual Production
Sylvia Beach
Though the essays were solicited and overseen by Joyce
, SB
did much of the editorial work and designed the cover.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
179
Contributions included Samuel Beckett
's Dante
. . . Bruno
, Vico
...
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
...
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, 1982, pp. xi - xxiii; 275.
280
Textual Features
Caroline Blackwood
Critic Val Warner
called CB
a unique voice in twentieth-century British fiction.
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981–2025, Numerous volumes.
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...
Reception
Sarah Kane
A propos the Sheffield production of 2015, Alan Bennett
commented on the difficulty of achieving realism with such extreme violence: how can a character mutilated on stage be shown as having attention for anything at...
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, 1983.
189, 252
Publishing
Anne Carson
AC
dealt another glancing blow to conventional notions of genre in 2001 by titling her next verse novel The Beauty of the Husband. A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. Four poems from this work...
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.
Craig, Alec. The Banned Books of England and Other Countries. George Allen and Unwin, 1962.
112
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
391-2
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.
Gordon, Giles. “Reading Ann Quin’s Berg”. Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture, 2001.
