MA
, whose work spans the Romantic and Victorian periods, was a poet who wrote wittily on religious and secular topics, and was an early champion of the governess. With Felicia Hemans
, she was...
Frances Neville, Baroness Abergavenny
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FNBA
both collected and composed devotional writings during the sixteenth century, which reached print after her death. Thomas Bentley
, including a generous selection in his Monument of Matrones, 1582, presents them as concerned...
Valentine Ackland
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VA
published very little in her lifetime, and has gone largely unrecognised since. Her lifelong partner, Sylvia Townsend Warner
, was very supportive of Ackland and helped her to get her writing into print. This...
Abigail Adams
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AA
holds a secure place in history as a founding mother of the USA: wife of one President, mother of another. As a writer, too, her involvement from the margins in shaping the young...
Henry Brooks Adams
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Sarah Flower Adams
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SFA
was a poet, a contributor to periodicals, and a hymn-writer. Over the course of her career she published a dramatic poem, a catechism for children, and fourteen hymns. Her uncollected works include numerous poems...
Fleur Adcock
Born a New Zealander, but an Englishwoman by adoption, FA
is a later twentieth-century poet. She has also done notable work as a translator, anthologist, and critic, but whereas many poets of her generation have...
Joseph Addison
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Grace Aguilar
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GA
, author of short stories, novels, and religious writings, was the only Anglo-Jewish woman in the nineteenth century to achieve considerable success as a writer. In addition to writing for gift-books and periodicals, in...
Joan Aiken
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JA
was a popular and successful later twentieth-century writer of short stories and longer fictions for children, most of which are fantasies or have strong supernatural or mystery elements. She also wrote adult novels (both...
Lucy Aikin
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LA
's famous relations made her modest about her creative writing. Publishing during the early nineteenth century, she has to her credit a major poem expressing revisionist historical and feminist ideas, and an interesting novel...
William Harrison Ainsworth
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Anna Akhmatova
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Writing through the turmoils of the twentieth century, AA
(Anna of all the Russias as she was solemnly called by her fellow poet Marina Tsvetaeva
) was one of the greatest poets of Russian...
Louisa May Alcott
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United States novelist LMA
published during the later nineteenth century more than three hundred writings, including works for children, short stories, letters, poetry, novels, plays, sensation fiction, and journalism. Little Women, her best-known work...
Naomi Alderman
NA
is a contemporary writer who has become equally well known for serious literary novels and for digital games. She also publishes short fiction and journalism.
Cecil Frances Alexander
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CFA
wrote both hymns and verse, the latter also usually adaptable for music. Her work was mainly directed towards young audiences, as she excelled
Julian, John, editor. A Dictionary of Hymnology. Dover Publications, 1957.
at writing for children.
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Over the course of her career in...
Mrs Alexander
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Annie (French) Hector
initially wrote anonymously. Later, not long before her husband died, she adapted his given name, Alexander, and wrote as Mrs Alexander.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
She published over forty-two novels over the second half of...
Archibald Alison
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Rose Allatini
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RA
is known for a single novel, Despised and Rejected, 1918, whose pacifist and homosexual content has attracted critics. Yet her career as author of almost forty known novels and a few short stories...