Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
James Joyce
-
Standard Name: Joyce, James
Irish exile JJ
, hailed by Yeats
as a new kind of novelist even before his first novel was published, became one of the leading practitioners of modernism. As well as poems, a play, and a volume of short stories, he produced three important novels, from the last of which he put out several separate sections long before the whole appeared. Joyce encountered obstacles to publishing almost all his books, raised by censors both official and self-appointed. Without the tireless patronage of Harriet Shaw Weaver
and Sylvia Beach
, his last two books might never have been published at all.
Although JJ
says she is always reading contemporary young men and women writers coming out of Ireland today,
Moloney, Caitriona et al. Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices From the Field. Syracuse University Press, 2003.
67
in her short list of her most beloved books Ireland is just outnumbered by England and...
Leisure and Society
Sylvia Beach
Hemingway
was scheduled to read alone but was frightfully anxious, so he asked Stephen Spender
, whom he had met in Spain, to come along and read too. Hemingway was still nervous on the...
Literary responses
Alice Oswald
David Wheatley
responded to this poem by establishing it as a landmark in the broadest literary landscape. He compared Oswald in some detail with Joyce
(another writer much possessed by water). He rejoiced at her...
Literary responses
Mary Lavin
This volume brought ML
critical acclaim. R. J. Thompson
read it as establishing her position as one of the most artful and perceptive masters of the story form in our day.
qtd. in
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
In Ireland, wrote the...
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
Pilgrimage and its author have been grouped with various other writers and literary methods, particularly with Virginia Woolf
, James Joyce
, and Marcel Proust
, who set out to explore and record linked elements...
Literary responses
Augusta Gregory
Joyce
(who with Padraic Pearseneeded to throw stones at the Irish Literary Revival and Irish Literary Theatre as anti-national,
Tóibín, Colm. “After I am hanged my portrait will be interesting”. London Review of Books, Vol.
38
, No. 7, 31 Mar. 2016, pp. 11-23.
13
wrote a hostile review. The origins of Gregory's stories, he alleged, were feeble...
Literary responses
Mary Butts
This book attracted considerable critical attention. It was listed in the Daily Telegraph's Books of the Week and reviewed in the Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Scotsman, and the Irish...
Literary responses
Mary Butts
The first edition of Ashe of Rings was not extensively reviewed. Although an unimpressed reviewer for the Liverpool Courier characterised it as another bad case of Futurism (like the writing of James Joyce
and Dorothy Richardson
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
The first reviewer, in the Sunday Observer, found DR
's narrative strategy extraordinary, but remarkably clear. He noted that her leaving the reader without explanations or apologies was not in the least troubling or...
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
Some of Richardson's readers considered that she, like Joyce
, focused more than necessary on the seamier details of life. Reviewers were not altogether impressed by this novel. Reviewing Richardson again in the Athenæum in...
Literary responses
Christina Stead
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer (the same who had hailed Stead the short-story writer as an impressive new talent) ranked her novel far lower. Even though he found here curiosity, wit, delight in words, and...
Literary responses
Christina Stead
Stead's biographer Hazel Rowley observes that reviewers were nonplussed.
Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Secker and Warburg, 1995.
205
Harold Strauss
in the New York Times Book Review (who found himself reminded of James Joyce
) felt forced to praise . ....
Literary responses
Jean Rhys
Critically, Rhys has been lauded as a modernist writer, a feminist writer, and, more recently, a postcolonial, Caribbean, or Creole writer. Biographer Carole Angier suggests that her preoccupation with exile was common in her time...
Literary responses
Anna Livia
In American Book Review, John Jacob
commented that Minimax was a novel James Joyce
would have shown an interest in . . . [Anna Livia] has infused her writing with . . . inventiveness...
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
VW
wrote to Ethel Smyth
that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
