Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Héloïse
-
Standard Name: Héloïse
Birth Name: Héloïse
Used Form: Heloise
Used Form: Eloisa
Héloïse
was a woman of high intellectual ability who strove by several different means to reach beyond what twelfth-century convention allowed her. The texts of some letters addressed to her one-time lover on the topic of the conventual life for women, as well as at least one which warmly recalls their former love, have come down to posterity.
More familiar medieval figures, Héloïse
and Abelard
, appear in this volume too, in a screenplay or dialogue.
Sampson, Fiona. “Symphony of sighs”. theguardian.com.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Monica Furlong
MF
images these women, active between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, as a wave, slow and tentative at first, rising to a crescendo with Julian of Norwich
, the one who speaks most clearly...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ann Thicknesse
AT
makes it clear she is no proto-feminist: If women are thought to possess minds less capable of solid reflection than men, they owe this conjecture entirely to their own vanity, and erroneous method of...
Textual Production
Helen Waddell
Helen Waddell
published a historical novel entitled Peter Abelard (in which, naturally, Heloise
is also an important figure).
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Helen Waddell
Abelard figured in her imagination as her ideal man, and on at least one occasion she dreamed that she herself was Heloise
(as an abbess and an elderly woman after Abelard's death).
Blackett, Monica. The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. Constable.
HG
published the five-act tragedy Abelard
and Heloise.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
HG
was inspired to write this play when she stumbled across the tomb of Héloïse
and Abelard
in the Père Lachaise Cemetery of Paris. She felt compelled to write an interpretation of their story...
Textual Production
Constantia Grierson
A long untitled poem in CG
's manuscript album beginning Ah Theodosius could mankind but see expresses the love of Constantia for Theodosius, using a literary veil drawn from the story of lovers of these...
AP
published his one-volume Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, including the previously unpublished epistle Eloisa
to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.
Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Editor Butt, John, Methuen; Yale University Press.
2: 312
Textual Features
Helen Waddell
Peter Abelard, set in Paris and Brittany, runs from June 1116 to November 1122. It is fully novelistic in style, opening with a passage in which Abelard, as a thirty-six-year-old lecturer, savours his...
Textual Features
Marie Belloc Lowndes
In her reviewing capacity she was able to comment on several texts central to the European tradition of women's writing. She called Marie de Lafayette
's La Princesse de Cleves (re-issued as part of an...
Textual Features
Alexander Pope
These two poems celebrate passionate love and loss experienced by fictional women, victimised by an unfeeling world; the first is a tour de force of ventriloquism, as Pope persuasively adopts a female voice. Pope's Eloisa...
Publishing
Antonia Fraser
She followed it with Love Letters: An Anthology, dedicated to Harold Pinter
and published in later 1976.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada.
62
Writing about this book in the Times on 6 November that year, AF
noted that she...
Publishing
Anna Seward
AS
compiled a 7-page booklet, Memoirs of Abelard
and Eloisa, which was issued at Newcastle with other Abelard and Eloisa material.
The British Library Catalogue lists AS
's contribution as part of a larger work.
Seward, Anna et al. “Memoirs of Abelard and Eloisa”. Letters of Abelard and Eloisa, translated by. John Hughes and John Hughes, J. Mitchell.
title-page
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Timeline
January 1761: Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his epistolary...
Writing climate item
January 1761
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
published his epistolarynovelJulie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse; it was translated into English the same year by William Kenrick
.
Texts
Abelard, Peter, and Héloïse. “Editorial Materials”. The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse, translated by. Betty Radice, Penguin, 1974.
Abelard, Peter, and Héloïse. Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Translator Hughes, John, J. Watts, 1713.
Seward, Anna et al. “Memoirs of Abelard and Eloisa”. Letters of Abelard and Eloisa, translated by. John Hughes and John Hughes, J. Mitchell, 1805.
Abelard, Peter et al. Petri Abaelardi, Sancti Gildasii in Britannia abbatis, et Heloisae coniugis eius, quae postmodum prima coenobii paraclitensis abbatissa fuit, Opera. Editor Du Chesne, André, Nicolai Buon, 1616.