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 focus on education still allows much memorable extraneous detail. One of the characters for a moment thinks a seated clerical figure is a ghost. Topics discussed in stimulating detail among the adult characters include...
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Textual Production
Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
Friends, Associates
Hannah More
Here she began to gather the circle of friends which by the end of her long life had touched every cranny of English society. She had already met Edmund Burke
in Bristol the previous September...
Textual Production
Hannah More
Like Frances Burney
's Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy, this was written for the benefit of Frances Anne Crewe
's fund for relief of French clerical refugees. More expressed the hope...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
EM
met Frances Burney
at Hester Thrale
's house, Streatham Park, near London.
Hemlow, Joyce. The History of Fanny Burney. Clarendon.
106-7
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
The leading figures in the movement were Montagu herself (who spent freely in hospitality, and who was later dubbed the Queen of the Bluestockings or Queen of the Blues) and Carter
(the most intellectually...
Textual Production
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...
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
This is another worldly satirical comedy. The parents in question are divided by nationality (Grace is English, Charles is French) and class (bourgeoisie and nobility). Their son Sigismund, or Sigi, delights in setting one against...
Occupation
Anna Miller
The day chosen was Friday, later switched to Thursday. The meetings took place in winter, the fashionable season at Bath, and upper-class visitors were eager to attend. Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire
visited during the first...
Friends, Associates
Anna Miller
ALM's literary ambitions and her self-publicizing
Whyman, Susan E. The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800. Oxford University Press.
192
made her respected in and around Bath but ridiculed and despised in London. Mme du Deffand
found both her and her husband ennuyeux.
Frances Burney
called...
Textual Production
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:...
Publishing
Elizabeth Meeke
Ducray-Duménil's novel was Jules; ou, Le toit paternel, Paris, 1806, and Cottin's much shorter tale was Elisabeth; ou, Les exilés de Sibérie, published on its own the same year. The Cottin tale (said...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Meeke
This novel opens on the low-bred Wheeler family (ex-servants in charge of a Westminster School
boarding-house), and on a scene of noise, quarrelling, and confusion. The thoroughly nasty twenty-year-old John Wheeler comes home to seek...
