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

Edith Mary Moore

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EMM , early twentieth-century novelist, also published, years after the virtual end of her career in fiction, non-fictional works including a long essay or brief treatise on the relations between women and men. Her novels...

Marianne Moore

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MM was a pivotal figure in US poetry of the twentieth century. A recent editor has written that no major poet is cherished more and known less from that period in America.
Moore, Marianne. “Introduction”. The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, Faber, 2003, p. xix - xxx.
xix
As well...
Marianne Moore Black and white photograph of Marianne Moore, standing against a bookshelf. Her grey hair is in a plait round her head; she wears a large dark jacket over a grey suit, collared shirt, and bow-tie.

Elinor Mordaunt

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Beginning in the very early twentieth century, EM wrote and published more than fifty books, most of them popular novels but also including remarkable travel books as well as short stories, books for children, and...

Hannah More

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During her long and phenomenally productive career HM wrote plays, poems, a single novel and much social, religious, and political commentary. She was the leading conservative and Christian moralist of her day. Her political opinions...
Hannah More Photograph of a painting of Hannah More by Henry William Pickersgill, 1822. She is seated on a red-upholstered chair beside a little table draped in red fabric and bearing a quill pen, inkwell, and piece of paper. She wears a blue-green mantle with V neck and creamy fabric at the cuffs and neckline, finished with a ruff around her neck. She has a gold shawl and a cap topped with pale blue ribbons. More wrote that she was "condemned, sorely against her will," to sit for this portrait. The version here, in th

Mary More

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An amateur writer of the mid-seventeenth century (as well as a painter) who could also turn her hand to verse, MM left two surviving, unpublished works, both entirely forgotten until very recently. The now better-known...

Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan

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In her capacities as poet, novelist, and travel writer with a sharp eye for culture and politics, SOLM spoke for the early movement of Irish nationalism. She also wrote plays and verse. Her reputation, once...
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan Full-length portrait of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, by René Théodore Berthon, c. 1818. She sits in an ornate chair, with an elbow on a desk bearing paper, an inkwell, and a vase of flowers; her head rests pensively on her hand. She is wearing a black Empire-style dress with short puff sleeves, and holding a quill pen. A blue mantle with plentiful white fur trim is thrown carelessly on her chair. National Gallery of Ireland.

Lady Ottoline Morrell

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LOM is best known as an early twentieth-century literary hostess who appears frequently in the memoirs, biographies, and fictions written by her guests. She aspired to be a writer herself, and she produced journals, letters...
Lady Ottoline Morrell Sepia-toned photograph of Lady Ottoline Morrell, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a dark velvet dress with a layer of lace at the top and arms made of semi-sheer ribbed material. Her hair is jaw length, dark, and curly, and she is wearing pearl earrings and necklaces.

Jan Morris

In the 1950s and 60s Morris was one of the most successful young British journalists, famous especially for an account of the conquest of Mount Everest. Identifying as a woman by 1972, Morris was...
Jan Morris Black-and-white photo of Jan Morris seated on what looks like a hotel bed, smiling.

Toni Morrison

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TM 's eleven novels give her a place as one of the major American novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her books of non-fiction—speeches and essays on social and literary topics— give her an...
Toni Morrison Head-shot in colour of Toni Morrison with a big smile. She is wearing red lipstick, gold earrings, and a black jacket over a leopard-spotted shirt. Her hair is short and grey.

Penelope Mortimer

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PM wrote (during the second half of the twentieth century) acerbic novels and stories about middle-class marriages and the frustrations of family life. She also wrote for newspapers and television, and collaborated with her second...
Penelope Mortimer Black-and-white candid photo of Emily Mortimer seated on a chair in front of close blinds with the sun streaming through. She is holding a lit cigarette in her right hand and her expression looks serene.

Sarah Wentworth Morton

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SWM , poet of the American Revolution, is remembered for the long, sentimental, narrative poems in which she considers the make-up of the new nation, inter-racial relationships (equal male friendship, unequal heterosexual love), the relationship...
Sarah Wentworth Morton Half-length painting of Sarah Wentworth Morton by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1802. She sits in a red chair looking at the viewer in half-profile, her dark hair and dress merging into the black background and only her face, décolletage, and forearms standing out dramatically, with a gold shawl at her elbows. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.

Celia Moss

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Celia Moss was a short-story writer and poet who began her career as a collaborator with her sister Marion . Her works focus on Jewish culture and spirituality, while querying the early Victorian construction of...

Marion Moss

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Marion Moss , along with her sister Celia , put forward in print a two-sided message. On the one hand they called for greater understanding among Christians of Jewish culture and greater toleration (in the...

Henrietta Rouviere Mosse

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HRM published about ten novels and a volume of short fiction with the Minerva Press and its successor during the early nineteenth century; writing at first for pleasure, then out of increasingly desperate financial need...

Martha Moulsworth

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It is hard to believe that MM —a seventeenth-century woman who left a single, thoughtful, accomplished poem—was not a writer in a larger sense. One or two other poems might plausibly be hers, and she...

Anne Mozley

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AM , publishing from the late 1830s to the final decade of the century, remained always anonymous and worked mostly in marginal genres, with the result that she is little known and several of her...

Harriett Mozley

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HM 's writings, published over about a decade of the mid-nineteenth century, are deeply involved with the sectarian struggles within the Church of England to which her brother, later Cardinal Newman , largely contributed. She...

Willa Muir

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WM , a twentieth-century Scotswoman, wrote in fiction and non-fiction about gender inequality, patriarchy, and the repressiveness of Calvinism, but never defined herself as a feminist. She was alert to the devaluing of women's work...