Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charles Dickens
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Standard Name: Dickens, Charles
Birth Name: Charles John Huffam Dickens
Indexed Name: Charles Dickens
Pseudonym: Boz
Pseudonym: Timothy Sparks
A prolific novelist, journalist, and editor of periodicals such as Household Words and All the Year Round, CD
crucially shaped Victorian fiction both by developing it as a dialogical, multi-plotted, and socially aware form and by his innovations in publishing serially. As a novelist he worked across a range of genres, including the bildungsroman, picaresque, Newgate, sensation and detective fiction, and usually with satiric or socially critical force. He was loved by readers for his humour, grotesquerie, action, and vigour. An influential public figure and phenomenally successful lecturer during his lifetime, his work continues to be central to popular understandings of nineteenth-century England, and in particular London.
A recurring theme in Cranford is the resistance to change of this insular group—who are convinced, for instance, that robberies must be perpetrated by strangers and that a Signor Brunoni, who turns out to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
The novel begins under the sign of Dickens
as one of its two narrator-heroines, then known as Susan Trinder, remembers being taken to see Oliver Twist on stage as a small child, and her terror...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
SW
puts in puts in something like a regular work day when writing, but keeps going to all hours when re-writing. Despite her success, she still finds the process largely torture. And yet [s]tarting...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Despite its sensational plot and purple prose, MEB
's first attempt at infusing a touch of poetry and the subjective into her writing through character painting
qtd. in
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
161
does result in greater character development than in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
infused a touch of poetry more literally by frequent allusion to works by Tennyson
, including Mariana, The Deserted House, and The Lotos-Eaters. Her trademark use of other authors' texts as...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isabella Bird
She used her royalties to buy boats for impoverished Scottish fishermen.
Kaye, Evelyn. Amazing Traveler, Isabella Bird: The Biography of a Victorian Adventurer. Blue Penguin Publications, 1994.
29-30
There were literary precedents for the kind of book IB
created on her return to England. Frances Trollope
had published in 1832 her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Alice Walker
The opening words of the title are quoted from June Jordan
. The opening words of the text, more surprisingly, come from Dickens
: It is the worst of times. It is the best of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
Intertextuality and Influence
C. E. Plumptre
CEP
takes an unconventional critical approach in applying her theory of causation to a lengthy analysis of literature. She concludes that it is when depicting the subtler operations of the human mind that George Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence
Emma Jane Worboise
Each chapter begins with a religious epigraph. This novel recounts the story of the attractive nineteen-year-old bride, Lilian Grey, who makes a marriage above her social class with the aristocratic Basil Hope.
Worboise, Emma Jane. The Wife’s Trials; Married Life; Husbands and Wives. Garland, 1976.
Wife's Trials: 1-3, 9
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
The protagonist and first-person narrator, Zoë Cunningham, like other Brookner heroines, has difficulty extricating her own life from that of her widowed mother. In this case the mother, Anne, is twice widowed: Simon, whom she...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Smythies
This opens on Christmas Eve, with London under snow, looking like the great sinner that she is, doing penance, as she ought to do, in a white sheet,
Smythies, Harriet. Left to Themselves. Hurst and Blackett, 1863, 3 vols.
1: 3
with two poverty-stricken boys of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ellen Wood
Charles Wood
states that Mildred Arkell seeks to address the hopelessness that fell upon so many when the ports were opened:
Wood, C. W. Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood. Third, R. Bentley and Son, 1895.
45
a reference to Wood's family's financial loss which followed from the changes...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Paston
At the beginning of the play, the generation gap is marked by Dickens
's Old Curiosity Shop: while the parents dissolve in tears, their daughter cries out with embarrassment, Silly old Dickens again! You...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
Her pamphlet was an attack on a recent series of pieces by Henry Morley
in Household Words on the dangers of unfenced machinery, and the unworkability of the related factory acts legislation. HM
also attacked...
