Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Strickland
-
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.
AS
, writing in the middle nineteenth century, won renown as a historian and biographer, particularly of the British royal family and particularly of its female members. In fact all of these books were co-authored...
Author summary
Catharine Parr Traill
CPT
, sister of the writers Elizabeth
and Agnes Strickland
and Susanna Moodie
, is best known for her naturalist writing about nineteenth-century Upper Canada. She was a letter-writer widely respected and eventually rewarded for...
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discovered in Russia some unpublished letters of Mary Queen of Scots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.
112-13
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produced an edition of the Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, to which they were able to bring much unpublished material.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 et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking.
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...
Bunbury, Selina. The Star of the Court. Grant and Griffith.
vi
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...
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
....
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.
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.
265
When she moved to London, JP
included among her friends...
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.
5, 212
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
