Author profiles

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y

Maria Abdy

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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...
Black and white photograph of Valentine Ackland in a rural setting at Winterton in Norfolk (her family's holiday home) in 1928. Her hair is cropped short, and she is wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, dark tie, breeches, and hunting boots, and holding a rifle.

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...
Black and white photograph of a painting of Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart. She is seated in a chair draped in a blanket, with her hands clasped in her lap. She wears a simple dark dress with long sleeves trimmed with white ruffles, and a high light neckline, also ruffled. She has a sheer lace shawl wrapped around her shoulders and on her head a bonnet trimmed with lace and wrapped with ribbon tied in a bow. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

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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A black and white drawing of Sarah Flower Adams. She looks over her left shoulder at the viewer with a small smile.

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...
Black-and-white photograph of Fleur Adcock, seated with a microphone, reading her poetry to an audience aboard a covered boat during the Adelaide Festival of Arts, 5 March 1986.

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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Black and white engraved print of Grace Aguilar. She wears a dark coat with a buckle in the V of the collar with a necklace attached. She faces the viewer at an angle, with a small, closed smile.

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...
Black-and-white photograph of Joan Aiken, who is standing between two large columns, 19 October 1984.

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...
Title page of Lucy Aikin's "Epistles on Women, exemplifying their character and condition in various ages and nations. With miscellaneous poems", 1810, with the author's name and the colophon of the publisher, Joseph Johnson.

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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Photograph of a painted portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1922. She is shown from the shoulders up, at a three-quarter turn, against a blue background which incorporates another, sketched figure behind her in similar shades of blue.

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...
Sepia head-and-shoulders photograph of Louisa May Alcott by Warren's Portraits, c. 1870. She looks pensively away from the camera, wearing a dark dress with two frills up the front, her wavy hair tied back in a bun at the nape of her neck.

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...
Photograph of Naomi Alderman, standing and holding her novel, The Power, at the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction event, Royal Albert Hall, London, 7 June 2017.

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.
Black and white photograph of Cecil Frances Alexander, seated at a desk. There are writing supplies on the desk and she clasps a book on her lap with one hand. The other elbow rests on the desk, with that hand to the side of her head.

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...
Portrait of Mrs. Alexander, shown from the waist up. She appears to be wearing a fur coat and a white bonnet.

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...

Grant Allen

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