Dinah Mulock Craik

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Standard Name: Craik, Dinah Mulock
Birth Name: Dinah Maria Mulock
Married Name: Dinah Maria Craik
Indexed Name: Dinah Maria Craik
Pseudonym: The author of Olive
Pseudonym: The author of John Halifax, Gentleman
Used Form: Miss Mulock
Used Form: Mrs Craik
Used Form: the author of A Hero
Used Form: the author of Michael the Miner
Used Form: the author of Olive and the Ogilvies
Used Form: the author of The Head of the Family
Used Form: the author of The Ogilvies
A prolific mid-Victorian professional writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and travel writing, DMC published twenty novels whose commitment to Christian ideals of self-sacrifice and Victorian middle-class values joins with trenchant feminist critique and narrative innovation. John Halifax, Gentleman, portrait of a self-made industrialist, is less representative than her novels about the ongoing practical and psychological challenges facing women in difficult circumstances. DMC 's strong delineation of character and relationships, tendency to write beyond the marriage ending, and treatments of race and ethnicity all repay consideration. Some of her children's stories remain in circulation today. As an essayist, she produced forthright yet witty advice directed at improving women's lot. Her work has fallen into obscurity, although she was one of the most widely read authors of her time.
Oil portrait of Dinah Mulock Craik, by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, 1887. She sits in a wooden chair, her full-figured torso facing to her left but her face turned to look directly at the viewer and hands folded in her lap. She wears a dark dress which merges with the dark background, and a white high-collared blouse with embroidery at the sleeves and lacing in front. She wears a lace headpiece hanging from her grey hair, and her expression is stern. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Dedications Geraldine Jewsbury
She received £180 from publishers Hurst and Blackett . The novel was dedicated to D. M.
Jewsbury, Geraldine. Right or Wrong. Hurst and Blackett, 1859.
prelims
whom some believe to be Dinah Mulock Craik , though it has been argued that the true recipient...
Education Beatrix Potter
Beatrix, educated at home and six years older than her brother, was a solitary child. She had few toys; but she became deeply interested in science, and was also, from an early age, devoted to...
Education Kate Chopin
Following her father's death, her education was supplemented by her maternal great-grandmother Victoire Verdon Charleville , who placed a particular emphasis on French and music.The young Kate O'Flaherty was also a voracious reader, and enjoyed...
Education Virginia Woolf
Between 1 January and 30 June 1897, her reading included but was not limited to the following: Charlotte Brontë , Lady Barlow (a commentator on Charles Darwin ), Dinah Mulock Craik , George Eliot ,...
Family and Intimate relationships Georgiana Craik
GC was related by marriage to prominent novelist Dinah Mulock Craik . Dinah Mulock married a nephew of Georgina's father, who shared his name of George Lillie Craik and was a partner at the Macmillan...
Family and Intimate relationships Camilla Crosland
According to Newton Crosland's autobiography, Rambles Round My Life, he was initially attracted to both Camilla and her friend Dinah Craik . He admits, I was captivated by both ladies at the same time...
Friends, Associates John Ruskin
JR 's social and intellectual network was extensive: amongst his acquaintances were Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning , Elizabeth Gaskell , Violet Hunt , Jean Ingelow , Flora Shaw , Jane Welsh Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Barrett Browning
During their visits to London, the Brownings socialised with such prominent figures as John Ruskin , Jane and Thomas Carlyle , Alfred Tennyson , Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti , and Charles Kingsley ....
Friends, Associates Sarah Tytler
ST 's career as a writer introduced her to many leading literary figures (especially those of Scots origin) whom she entertainingly describes in Three Generations.
Tytler, Sarah. Three Generations. J. Murray, 1911.
261-344
She became an especially good friend of Dinah Mulock Craik
Friends, Associates Anna Maria Hall
One of AMH 's closest friends was the actress Helen Faucit , later Lady Martin. Though socially conservative in her attitudes, she was apparently more ready than her husband to achieve friendly relations with those...
Friends, Associates Mona Caird
She met Arthur Symons in June 1889, and in the following month Thomas Hardy carefully arranged to sit between her and Rosamund Marriott Watson (and opposite F. Mabel Robinson ) at a dinner of the...
Friends, Associates Camilla Crosland
In the years leading up to her marriage, Camilla Toulmin and Dinah Mulock Craik were good friends (Craik was one of her bridesmaids); however, Craik's biographer Sally Mitchell mentions Crosland only briefly. Newton Crosland posits...
Friends, Associates Margaret Oliphant
MO and her husband sometimes attended parties with such writers as Samuel Carter Hall , Anna Maria Hall , Dinah Mulock (later Craik) , and Mary Howitt .
Williams, Merryn. Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography. St Martin’s Press, 1986.
19
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Barrett Browning
American poet Emily Dickinson loved EBB 's poetry. The language of Aurora Leigh crops up throughout her oeuvre, and she recalls the transformative experience, sanctifying the soul, of her early reading in one poem: I...
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Hodgson Burnett
The narrative opens rivetingly with the deaths of Mary's parents and her Indian nurse of cholera, her being discovered quite forgotten in the empty house of death and shipped to England, and her arrival at...

Timeline

By 3 March 1470
Sir Thomas Malory , a political prisoner in London, most probably in the Tower, finished compiling and writing his collection of legendaryArthurian romances, Le Morte d'Arthur.
1 September 1835
As of this date, Lord Lyndhurst 's Act made marriages between in-laws, such as a man and his deceased wife's sister, illegal in England.
January 1845
Douglas Jerrold 's Shilling Magazine began publication at the Punch office; this short-lived radical journal addressed the masses of England.
By 23 September 1848
A volume of fourteen Poems by a Sempstress, published by E. L. E., called for just and equal brotherhood.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1091 (1848): 957
2 May 1857
A grand dome designed by Panizzi was opened in what had been the central courtyard of the British Museum .
1 November 1859
Alexander Macmillan began publishing Macmillan's Magazine, the first major monthly magazine priced at a shilling.
1877
Only 1% of the female inmates at Tothill local prison could be described as functionally literate.