Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Frances Burney
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Standard Name: Burney, Frances
Birth Name: Frances Burney
Nickname: Fanny
Nickname: The Old Lady
Married Name: Frances D'Arblay
Indexed Name: Madame D'Arblay
Pseudonym: A Sister of the Order
Used Form: the author of Evelina
Used Form: the author of Evelina and Cecilia
Used Form: the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla
FB
, renowned as a novelist in her youth and middle age, outlived her high reputation; her fourth and last novel (published in 1814) was her least well received. Her diaries and letters, posthumously published, were greeted with renewed acclaim. During the late twentieth century the re-awakening of interest in her fiction and the rediscovery of her plays revealed her as a woman of letters to be reckoned with. Today her reputation in the academic world stands high, and productions of her plays are no longer isolated events.
The French heroine tells her own life-story. Her mother dies at her birth. Among various persecutions, she is abducted and imprisoned in one of those rooms, not uncommonly found in old castles, where the owner...
Textual Features
L. E. L.
The novel also has a strong political element. It comments on the power of newspapers in national life, through reporting and editorials but also through advertising. Mr Delawarr is, says literary historian Edward Copeland, a...
Textual Features
Ann Thicknesse
An introduction explains that this book, although called a novel, will not deal in pathetic tales of love, marvellous prodigies, or even . . . elegant flights of fancy, but only plain simple facts...
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Susannah Dobson
SD
says her previous choice of subjects (Petrarch and the troubadours) was dictated by the feeling that it was well worth while to pass over a multitude of tyrants, whose lives are written in blood...
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Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
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Frances Brooke
FB
invited Frances Burney
to collaborate with her on a new periodical; Burney declined.
The date is from Brooke's letter expressing regret.
McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press.
204-5, 235n2
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Charlotte Smith
It was small but handsome. Thomas Stothard
did two of the illustrations. His design for sonnet 12 (Written on the Sea Shore.—October 1784—the month in which she crossed the Channel with her children...
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Eliza Parsons
She gave her name as Mrs. Parsons on the title-page and signed the dedication with both her names.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 512
A title-page epigraph reads: Brutus said Virtue was but a name—tis more. ....
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Cassandra Cooke
As well as writings by CC
now among the Beachcroft family private archive (at the Bodleian Library
) and the Stoneleigh papers (at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
, Stratford-upon-Avon), the letters whose backs Frances Burney
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Hester Lynch Piozzi
HLP
was a voluminous letter-writer all her life. Though scholarly estimates differ, there is no doubt that thousands of her letters survive. The first selection appeared in print in 1833. Many early editions, however, had...
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Cassandra, Lady Hawke
By early 1782, when she met with Frances Burney
, CLH
had written or drafted two novels. According to her sister, Lady Saye and Sele
(who was keen that Burney should read them both), one...
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Elizabeth Montagu
A TLS review by R. W. Chapman
sounded distinctly anti-feminist. He wrote that by employing heroic remedies, the indomitable editor has cut away all the elaborate openings and studied conclusions, masses of domestic detail, nine-tenths...
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Sarah Harriet Burney
Colburn originally wanted to publish two volumes of tales together; then he agreed to publish The Shipwreck immediately if a second volume could be ready soon after Christmas 1815. He had advertised volume one on...
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Cassandra, Lady Hawke
Lady Saye and Sele
told Burney
that one of the unpublished novels by her sister is in letters, like yours. . . it's called the 'Mausoleum of Julia'!
Burney, Frances. Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay. Editors Barrett, Charlotte and Austin Dobson, Macmillan.
Of about a dozen other books in the series, this work was the only one written by a woman about a woman writer. Royds situates Barrett Browning within a strong tradition of women writers including...
