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.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Amelia Bristow
The Maniac deals with the effects of the Irish Rebellion. The narrator, Albert, has gone mad after returning home to find his house sacked and wife and children murdered. His sister, Emma, also dies and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Alethea Lewis
She heads her novel with a prefatory letter to the Rev. William Johnstone
, who, she says, has asked why she chooses to write fiction and not moral essays. She answers that novels offer opportunities...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Green
This preface is headed by two Latin words (one with a faulty grammatical ending) from Ovid
's description of chaos. SG
slams both male and female novelists, chiefly authors of gothic or horrid novels and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Cassandra Cooke
In a preface CC
says she found the incident that forms the centre of this novel in The Christian Life by Dr John Scott
(that is The Christian Life, from its beginning to its consummation...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
Having acquired her female mentor, Isabel faces the world of courtship and life-choices. Edward Leslie writes telling her how as a student he had loved Matilda Sutton, had then judged her too boring in her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Loudon
This strikingly inventive and ingenious tale seems to owe a good deal to Mary Shelley
's Frankenstein (though Shelley receives no tribute in passing, as do R. B. Sheridan
, Byron
, and especially Scott
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Holford
The novel shows considerable skill but an excess of words and of characters. Selima, daughter of a clandestine marriage, is adopted by the old maid Anne Aubrey after being brought up initially by an old...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
Three women help each other escape male persecution; the distressed heroine gets an ideal husband, Godolphin, who restores the social status which her illegitimate birth had robbed her of. Though the castle where Emmeline grows...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Fielding
Other women novelists found this a fertile text. Critic Susan Catto
suggested that the social ignorance of Lennox
's Arabella owes something to that of Ophelia. She also noted that at a ball the heroine...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rachel Hunter
Rachel, an heiress, gives her heart to a poor man whose family oppose the match for fear of being seen as mercenary. She is also something of a social rebel, a feminist (fond of gender-bending...
Intertextuality and Influence
Helen Craik
The novel had been advertised in April as to be published speedily.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 669
It appeared before the end of the year through the Minerva Press
in three volumes, with a frontispiece and French...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Ham
The story, set in Anglo-Saxon England, is that treated by Frances Burney
in her only play to reach the stage during her lifetime, Edwy and Elgiva. EH
was too young as well as...
Intertextuality and Influence
Nancy Mitford
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Caroline Lamb
The title-page of volume one of Graham Hamilton quotes Burns
; the second quotes Swift
denouncing scandal. Though quieter, this novel again displays splendid satirical energy. It contains only one lyric (written by Nathan for...
