Elizabeth Isabella Spence

-
Standard Name: Spence, Elizabeth Isabella
Indexed Name: Miss Spence
Pseudonym: A Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of Summer Excursions . . . .
EIS began publishing just before the end of the eighteenth century and continued for twenty-five years. She issued novels, shorter fiction, and travel books, the latter put together from letters sent to friends in the course of summer excursions around England, Wales, and Scotland (her native country). Her fiction sometimes draws on anecdotes from life, both recent and historical or pseudo-historical. As an author she is not distinguished, but her interest in circulating information about other women writers gives her some significance for women's literary history.

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Literary responses Christian Milne
CM knew from harsh experience that for a labouring-class woman, publishing poems invited personal criticism (as Elizabeth Hands in England had understood). She says she met with encouragement from patrons but that her neighbours assumed...
Textual Production Christian Milne
CM continued to write after her volume appeared. From about 1810 she was too ill and too busy to write much: I am obliged to descend from Parnassus, as she put it, and spend her...
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...
Health Ann Radcliffe
Rictor Norton believes that AR may have suffered a nervous breakdown in 1803, after finishing Gaston de Blondeville, and another in late 1812, after the publishing of Anna Seward 's letters alleging that she...
Literary responses Mary Robinson
On her deathbed MR regretted that most of her works had been composed in too much haste,
Robinson, Mary. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Editor Levy, Moses Joseph, Peter Owen.
151
and declared that if, against all expectation, she should survive, she would begin a new long work...
Friends, Associates Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
Their mother was living in Paris at this time, and Rosina lived in London with her uncle Sir John Doyle (latterly without her sister, who joined their mother in Paris). She reputedly had an unusual...
Textual Features Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
MAS adds a new aesthetic category, the contemplative sublime, alongside the Burke an or terrible sublime and other categories related to the Burkean beautiful. She derives her thinking from women as well as men. In...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
Elizabeth Isabella Spence , reporting on a visit to Bristol, mentions AY as an example of an obscure woman writer of genius.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
71
In 1990 Donna Landry wrote of her complex contradictions under the heading...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.