Menella Bute Smedley

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Standard Name: Smedley, Menella Bute
Birth Name: Menella Bute Smedley
Pseudonym: S. M.
Pseudonym: M. S.
Pseudonym: One of the Authors of Child-World
Pseudonym: B.
Pseudonym: The Author of Twice Lost
MBS published or co-published around fifteen titles in various genres: stories, novels, poetry, and books for children, besides her contribution to parliamentary reports about pauper schools. Her poetry makes accomplished and at times innovative use of dramatic and lyric form in its treatment of historical and contemporary material. Her work is distinguished by its sensitive depictions of women's struggles for independent lives and effective action, its acute dissection of Victorian gender conventions, and its positive representations of feminism and unconventional femininity.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Rudyard Kipling
Even during the years of the detested Southsea school RK was developing an appreciation for literature. He writes of being surprised when reading (something Mrs Holloway forced him to do under threat of punishment) turned...
Textual Features Josephine Butler
The new magazine continued Kettledrum's current serial by Menella Bute Smedley , entitled Lucy Ferrars, and some pieces related to JB 's edited collection Woman's Work and Woman's Culture, published the same...
Textual Production Mary Boyle
Sometime after 1864 MB worked together with Tennyson , Landor , and Wordsworth in a miscellany encouraged by Lord Northampton (brother of her friend Lady Marian Alford, and son of the remarkable poet Margaret, Lady Northampton

Timeline

4 October 1818
Frank Smedley , novelist, cousin and mentor of Menella Bute Smedley , was born in Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
January 1849-March 1850
Frank Smedley 's Frank Fairlegh; or, Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil was serialised, in monthly parts, in Sharpe's London Magazine.