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

May Cannan

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MC was a war poet in and shortly after the First World War. In her (posthumously published) autobiography she performs, from a different viewpoint, something of the same function as Vera Brittain as the historian...

Mary Carey

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MC wrote in prose and verse, in the mid seventeenth century, about her spiritual life and her trials (notably, the deaths of her children).

Rosa Nouchette Carey

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RNC , writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the author of about forty very popular novels of domestic life, many of them aimed at girls and young people. Although quite conventional romances...

Mary Carleton

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MC , who was active in London in the Restoration years, was at some level or other a confidence trickster or woman living on her wits. When she stood trial and became the subject of...
Mary Carleton Etching and line engraving of Mary Carleton with three male figures, by James Basire after F. Nicholls. It is an action scene: Carleton, in dark street clothes, gesticulating, a lawyer kneeling, and the other two men disputing a raised sword. A caption reads: "The German Princess with her Suppos'd Husband and Lawyer." These are two different people: extensive letterpress explains that the lawyer was another victim of her swindles. National Portrait Gallery.

Jane Welsh Carlyle

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JWC is well known for her prodigious letters, none of which were published during her lifetime.
Christianson, Aileen. “Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Private Writing Career”. A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh University Press, 1997, pp. 232-45.
232
Her witty epistles, which Thomas Carlyle praised for pick[ing] up every diamond-spark, out of the common floor-dust,
qtd. in
Carlyle, Thomas, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. “Introduction”. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, edited by Charles Richard Sanders, Duke University Press, 1970.
1: x
Jane Welsh Carlyle Photograph of a painting of Jane Welsh Carlyle by an unknown artist, at Carlyle's House in London. She is seen from the waist up, seated and looking down, with her head on one hand while the other holds a book. She wears a red velvet dress with lace at the collar and sleeves and a drop pearl at the neckline, as well as pearl bracelets and small gold rings. Her dark hair smooth, with a middle parting, and folded over her ears. National Trust'

Mary Carpenter

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MC , one of the founders of the Ragged Schools movement, was indefatigable in giving papers and publishing articles about her favourite topics: the use of education as a force for positive change, especially in...
Mary Carpenter Sepia photo of Mary Carpenter. She wears her grey hair in curls, under a head-band and cap with ear flaps. She has a dark, buttoned bodice with paler sleeves and white collar with a pendant in the centre.

Dora Carrington

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DC is known predominantly for her personal relationships with writer Lytton Strachey and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, but she produced much striking work—visual and literary—herself. André Derain and Simon Bussy gave her...
Dora Carrington Black and white photo of Dora Carrington standing beside a seated Lytton Strachey in a garden. She is wearing jodhpurs, riding boots, and a sweater over a shirt. Her hair is bobbed and she holds a horse's saddle with the left stirrup hanging down.

Leonora Carrington

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Though LC is best known for her visual art, she produced ample fiction, plays, and life writing that engage with aesthetic and political movements of her time, particularly surrealism and feminism. Her writing (published between...

Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a Canadian writer best known for her work in poetry, translation, fiction, literary criticism, and on and across the boundaries between poetry and prose and between one genre and another. She is...
Anne Carson Photo of Anne Carson holding a microphone and looking offstage as she speaks at The Shed, New York City, 6 March 2018.

Catherine Carswell

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CC is best known for her 1920 novel, Open the Door!, and her insightful critical biography of her close friend D. H. Lawrence . Her literary corpus consists of two novels, three biographies, and...

Angela Carter

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AC was a prolific writer in many genres throughout the later twentieth century. Best known for her novels and short stories, she also wrote plays (for radio, screen and stage), poetry, children's stories, journal articles...
Angela Carter Black-and-white portrait photograph of Angela Carter, seated, at an event in Lecce, Italy, May 1986.

Elizabeth Carter

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EC was renowned during a long span of the later eighteenth century as a scholar and translator from several languages and the most seriously learned among the Bluestockings. Her English version of Epictetus was...
Elizabeth Carter Portrait of Elizabeth Carter as Minerva, the Greek goddess of wisdom, by John Fayram in probably the late 1730s. She wears gilded metal armour over a white loose shirt and under a blue sash, and a helmet with feathery plume. She is holding in one hand a round shield, in the other a book bound in red, with gilt decoration, which (as Edward Cave revealed in writing her praise) is a copy of Plato. National Portrait Gallery.

Barbara Cartland

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An immensely prolific writer of romance, BC published more than seven hundred books during her career, which spanned more than seven decades of the twentieth century, and she left a legacy of more than 150...
Barbara Cartland Photograph of Barbra Cartland, seated in a silver upholstered armchair, with her hands clasped in her lap. She is wearing a silver dress with sparkly beading, a white fur shawl, and a large diamond necklace and earrings. Her hair is short, white, and styled in large curls. There is a red curtain behind her and a bouquet of pink and white flowers at the edge of the photograph's frame.

Lucy Cary

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LC was a seventeenth-century nun (like those of her sisters to whom her work has been variously ascribed). It was presumably as part of her religious life, more than for family or literary reasons, that...

Mary Cary

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Among the pamphleteers for the Parliament side in the English Civil War, MC stands out, not only for productivity but for her literary style, her sinewy argument, and her attention to setting the anti-monarchist party...

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

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Journalist and editor of the newspaper The Provincial Freeman in the northern US and Canada during the mid nineteenth century, MASC also wrote a short book advocating emigration to Canada for free blacks living in...
Mary Ann Shadd Cary Somewhat blurry black and white photograph of Mary Ann Shadd Cary. She is wearing a top buttoned waistcoat, with the details of her hair not able to be seen, however it seems to be braided back.

Margaret Catchpole

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MC was a late eighteenth-century labouring-class woman whose extraordinary experience as a transported felon propelled her (through the influence of Elizabeth Cobbold , her employer and an active woman writer) to express herself in letters...
Margaret Catchpole Watercolour of Margaret Catchpole by Richard Cobbold, done to accompany his much-fictionalised life of her, 1845 ( a quarter-century after her death). She has long, loose, dark hair and is dressed in blue.

Willa Cather

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WC ranks as one of the major American novelists of the earlier twentieth century, and her popularity has remained undiminished while her critical reputation has fluctuated. She was a highly professional journalist and reviewer before...
Willa Cather Black and white, three-quarter-length photo of Willa Cather, c. 1912, sitting facing the camera with her hands on the arms of her Renaissance-style chair. She is wearing a hat with a turned-up brim holding a plume of white feathers; her blouse and jacket are black. She has a short pendant at her throat, and a long, tasselled necklace which came to her from Sarah Orne Jewett.