Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Julia Kavanagh
-
Standard Name: Kavanagh, Julia
Birth Name: Julia Kavanagh
Indexed Name: J. K.
JK
, a prolific novelist and biographer, published extensively in order to support herself and her invalid mother during the second half of the nineteenth century. She has since disappeared into relative obscurity. JK
composed fifteen novels, often featuring independent women, along with four collections of biographical sketches, three short-story collections, and one children's story. She also published stories in a number of periodicals.
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As she began to establish herself as a writer, EW
became a friend of her fellow authors Anna Maria Hall
, Julia Kavanagh
, and Mary Howitt
. The latter wrote her a complimentary letter...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Brontë
Its influence is evident in numerous nineteenth-century novels, including in Britain Julia Kavanagh
's Nathalie (1850)—which may in turn have influenced Villette—as well as the later The House on the Marsh (1882) by Florence Warden
Literary responses
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Professionally, Morgan was a notable success. She was a canny businesswoman, never afraid to assert herself against an established publisher or seek out a new one. This paid off in a remarkable level of earnings...
Literary responses
Marie-Catherine d' Aulnoy
Julia Kavanagh
, author of French Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches, 1861, thought this was MCA
's only work written for grown-ups.
Kavanagh, Julia. French Women of Letters. Hurst and Blackett, 1862.
254
While admitting its deficiencies in incident and character, she praised its...
Literary responses
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
SFG
's importance to the influential Mary Wollstonecraft
can be gauged from the way that Wollstonecraft used and built on her writings, recommended them, measured others by their standard, and also did not hesitate to...
Publishing
Marie-Catherine d' Aulnoy
First published in French in 1690, this was reprinted throughout and beyond the eighteenth century. Even in what nineteenth-century writer Julia Kavanagh
calls the second year of the grim Republic, a publisher in Rouen brought...
Publishing
George Eliot
At about the same time that GE
took on the Westminster Review, she also began reviewing for The Leader, a weekly recently launched by Thornton Hunt
and George Henry Lewes
. Two uncomplimentary...
Reception
Aphra Behn
The late-twentieth-century revival of serious literary interest in AB
, instigated by feminist criticism, has reversed the situation described by William Beatty Warner
with regard to her fiction, in which literary historians used Behn as...
Textual Features
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
sees Behn as seductive, but appreciates her qualities of character as well as her sexuality. She clearly feels that the moment Behn inhabited, when a strong woman could make her way in a system...
Textual Production
Ellen Wood
EW
purchased the magazine from Alexander Strahan
, who had decided to sell following the backlash prompted by Charles Reade
's sexually frank novel Griffith Gaunt. Her position as editor of a family magazine...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Gaskell
The idea of self-improvement through writing and reading correlates to the strong emphasis in EG
's fiction on education and the impact of environment. This was undoubtedly influenced by a Unitarian intellectual background indebted to...
In her first essay, Lee offers a summary analysis of the English novelistic tradition. Judging them especially, though not entirely, on their treatments of morality, she evaluates writers including Jane Austen
, Maria Edgeworth
,...