Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Maria Callcott
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Standard Name: Callcott, Maria
Birth Name: Maria Dundas
Married Name: Maria Graham
Married Name: Maria Callcott
Titled: Maria, Lady Callcott
Used Form: Maria Graham (later Lady Callcott)
Used Form: Mrs Callcott
Used Form: Mrs Maria Graham
MC
did much of her early-nineteenth-century writing and publication under her first married name of Maria Graham. She is important both as a travel writer and as an art historian. Her writing of Europe and more distant countries is intelligent and enquiring (particularly into issues of race, class, and gender ignored by most of her contemporaries), polished, vividly descriptive, and reflective of an age of revolutions. She combines an enlightenment interest in non-European cultures and civilizations with attention to the conditions of women and of the oppressed. The same qualities inform her writings about art and history, including those for children. She also published scientific writing. She was successful in terms of sales, but curiously unacceptable, even from early in her career, to reviewers. Her Little Arthur's History of England sold prodigiously and became a household name.
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ES
received her first education at home, from her sisters Ethel, Bertha, and Mabel (the eldest), who taught the younger ones Bible stories on Sundays. At the same time she imbibed from her brothers the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Mary Walker
Her illegitimate grand-daughter Mary was taken back after LMW
's death by her father, Ugo Foscolo
, who had settled in London, where he had arrived on 11 September 1816. Mary brought him the...
Friends, Associates
Mary Russell Mitford
She knew most of the literary women of her day, including Felicia Hemans
(who wrote to ask her for an autograph),
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett, 1882.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. L’Estrange, Alfred Guy KinghamEditor , Harper and Brothers, 1870.
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Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
said her work was modelled not on the tragedy by Catharine Trotter
(later Cockburn)—in which Trotter in turn had drawn on a story by Aphra Behn
—but on an old Portuguese chronicle
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. L’Estrange, Alfred Guy KinghamEditor , Harper and Brothers, 1870.
Even after she had become a published author, EM
continued to educate her young children herself. She enjoyed taking them throughMaria Callcott
's Little Arthur's History of England and teaching them to know by...
Publishing
Anna Letitia Barbauld
In these books for the very young (first of all for her nephew and adoptive son), Barbauld tried to hit their level of comprehension and interest.
McCarthy, William. “The Celebrated Academy at Palgrave: A Documentary History of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s School”. The Age of Johnson, edited by Paul J. Korshin, pp. 279 -2.
305
The series became phenomenally popular, with eleven editions...
Textual Production
Cicely Hamilton
Between 1931 and 1939, CH
published a series of travel books, which includes works on France, 1933, Russia, 1934, Austria, 1935, Ireland, 1936, Scotland, 1937, England, 1938, and Sweden...
Textual Production
Charlotte Grace O'Brien
Someone named Charlotte O'Brien
began publishing in 1855 (when CGOB
was probably not yet ten) a series of little books for children, mostly now rare. After the first, The Coral Necklace, came A Simple...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ketaki Kushari Dyson
She considers a wide range of journalists and memoirists, particularly the lesser-known writers, embarking on a recuperative effort. Her purpose in illuminating the literary, historical, and sociological significance of the journals and memoirs was to...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Josepha Hale
SJH
does in the main a fine job in her coverage of British women writers, having something to say even about the extremely obscure. Dorothea Primrose Campbell
, for instance (who was living in poverty...