Elizabeth Strickland

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Standard Name: Strickland, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Strickland
Used Form: Eliza Strickland
ES published her earliest children's book under her name, though her periodical editing was anonymous. But although a number of women writers in various generations have chosen anonymity or obscurity, she is extraordinary in seeking to remain hidden when volumes of hers were appearing to great acclaim with her younger sister's name on them. She was content to work in collaboration with Agnes on these works of historical biography, scholarship, and editing, and to see the credit going entirely to Agnes. Even in the early twenty-first century the British Library Catalogue did not list most of her collaborative works under her name.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Agnes Strickland
AS died some time after suffering a fall and a stroke; her sister Elizabeth survived until the following year.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Pope-Hennessy, Una. Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the Queens of England. Chatto and Windus, 1940.
310
Education Agnes Strickland
Elizabeth and AS were studying history and palaeography (early handwriting) in the British Museum .
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Education Elinor Glyn
Since she abhorred her governesses, Elinor took her education into her own hands, reading every book she could in the library: Pepys 's diary, Cervantes ' Don Quixote (an eighteenth-century French version), Scott , Agnes
Family and Intimate relationships Susanna Moodie
Among SM 's five sisters, four became writers: Eliza or Elizabeth Strickland , Agnes Strickland (whose Lives of the Queens of England and other books were co-written with Elizabeth but bore her name alone), Jane Strickland
Family and Intimate relationships Agnes Strickland
All but one of AS 's five sisters became writers when they grew up. Elizabeth (1794-1875) became Agnes's collaborator or silent partner. Jane wrote children's stories. Catharine and Susanna both emigrated with their husbands to...
Family and Intimate relationships Catharine Parr Traill
Her sisters included the writers Agnes Strickland , Elizabeth Strickland , and Susanna Moodie . She shared a particularly close bond with Susanna, her fellow emigrant.
Gray, Charlotte. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Viking, 1999.
5, 212
Friends, Associates Eliza Lynn Linton
Eliza Lynn met a number of women authors who were once applauded but later complacently forgotten . . . . as literary fossils.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton, 1899.
85
She contended that Women who wrote were then few and far...
Friends, Associates Jane Porter
The Porters' mother lived a busy social life on limited means, and JP kept up this tradition. Sir Walter Scott was an early friend.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
265
When she moved to London, JP included among her friends...
Instructor Susanna Moodie
SM 's two elder sisters were well educated but the family could not afford a similar privilege for Catharine and Susanna, who were educated by their father and the elder sisters, Agnes and Elizabeth ....
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Howitt
In 1851 MH edited an illustrated volume of Biographical Sketches of the Queens of Great Britain from the Norman Conquest to The Reign of Victoria; or, Royal Book of Beauty; this followed in the...
Intertextuality and Influence Jean Plaidy
The following eighty or so novels that she wrote under this pseudonym garnered her a wide following. Even before becoming Jean Plaidy she had studied the business aspect of authorship and had learned that whatever...
Intertextuality and Influence Selina Bunbury
She drew chiefly on the histories written by George Cavendish and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger , and that in Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland 's Lives of the Queens of England.
Bunbury, Selina. The Star of the Court. Grant and Griffith, 1844.
vi
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
HM liked this the best of all her works.
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking, 1995.
1: 103
Its reception by others was predictably mixed. In the Unitarian Prospective Review, John James Tayler praised its descriptive eloquence, noted the strong censure...
Material Conditions of Writing Agnes Strickland
Elizabeth and AS 's historical studies in the British Museum produced an edition of the Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, to which they were able to bring much unpublished material.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870.
785 (12 November 1842): 966-9
Occupation Jane Porter
JP discovered in Russia some unpublished letters of Mary Queen of Scots , which she transcribed, and sent to her friends Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland for their edition.
Pope-Hennessy, Una. Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the Queens of England. Chatto and Windus, 1940.
112-13

Timeline

By 2 August 1856
Jane Margaret Strickland published a novel, Adonijah, a tale of the Jewish Dispersion; it was shortly attacked by George Eliot in Silly Novels by Lady Novelists as one of the deplorable types of fiction...