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.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press.
157
Later came the young Frances Burney
, who became a...
Family and Intimate relationships
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Gabriel Piozzi
came into Hester Thrale's life as music teacher of her eldest daughter. Two days before Henry Thrale's death a friend told her warningly, that Man is in Love with you.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press.
198
Probably by...
Textual Production
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...
Performance of text
Jane Porter
When the curtain rose Kean
(possibly drunk) appeared to have lost his memory, and his power of action.—The other Performers became disconcerted in their parts . . . the whole became a chaos of uproar...
Reception
Beatrix Potter
She sometimes wrote of her own drawing and painting as an obsession: Why cannot one be content to look at it? I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result. But also, watching and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Beatrix Potter
BP
was not content with her success as a children's writer, but hankered to establish herself as an author for adults. Her references in her private writings to Burney
(a propos of her first appearance...
Literary responses
Ann Radcliffe
Samuel Taylor Coleridge reviewed this novel somewhat belatedly for the Critical Review.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books.
81
The review in the Analytical, probably Wollstonecraft
's, offered strong endorsement. AR
's uncommon talent for gothic, it said, had...
Friends, Associates
Frances Reynolds
Frances Burney
comments on FR
less as a victim than as a joker with a mask of naiveté. She thought that Reynolds got upset too easily over trivia and was hamperingly indecisive. She reported her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Maria Riddell
The diary records some of her literary tastes: she copied there a letter expressing her dislike of tragedies (which, no matter how moral, she felt to be harmful to the mind because of the violent...
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 Production
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
While apparently received enthusiastically
Foster, Edward Halsey. Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Twayne.
129
in America, this book had a more mixed reception in Britain. A long review in the Athenæum began by describing CMS
as clear of affectation to the extent of being...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Seward
AS
's correspondence often deals with literary matters as well as with social matters and personalities. She writes with astonishing freedom to Hester Piozzi
about the latter's travel book Observations and Reflections: not only...
Education
Mary Martha Sherwood
From a very early age, MMS
remembered my mother teaching me to read with my brother, in a book where [there] was a picture of a white horse feeding by star-light.
Sherwood, Mary Martha, and Henry Sherwood. The Life of Mrs. Sherwood. Editor Kelly, Sophia, Darton.
