Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Samuel Beckett
-
Standard Name: Beckett, Samuel
SB
, Irish expatriate poet, short-story writer, novelist, and playwright, was a major force in international twentieth-century writing and especially theatre. He wrote a high proportion of his works in French, usually doing the translations into English himself. His increasingly death-obsessed absurdity and minimalism are combined with an invincible energy of language, even while the text appears to despair of the efficacy of words.
AQ
published a handful of short stories and articles in various journals, including Nova, the London Magazine, transatlantic review, and Antigonish Review.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
qtd. in
Sewell, Brocard, and Colin Wilson. Like Black Swans: Some People and Themes. Limited Edition, Tabb House, 1982.
186
In the mid-sixties she told her publisher,...
death
Harriet Shaw Weaver
Samuel Beckett
, hearing of the news in Paris, remarked to Sylvia Beach
: I . . . shall think of her when I think of goodness.
qtd. in
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking, 1970.
455
Having dedicated her life to English...
Friends, Associates
Cecily Mackworth
Her literary circle in Paris was highly eclectic: the many camps in which she had friends included the Surrealist rump, the incoming Existentialists, and the Communists (who were mostly ex-Surrealists).
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
At this time medical expenses in connection with a bad arm had cost her 20,000 francs.
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
121
Samuel Beckett
reported in 1956 that she was looking very wraithy.
Tayler, Christopher. “Under–the–Table–Talk”. London Review of Books, Vol.
37
, No. 6, 19 Mar. 2015, pp. 19-23.
19
Intertextuality and Influence
Shelagh Delaney
SD
wrote her first and most successful play, A Taste of Honey, at the age of nineteen. Published interviews give conflicting reports of her motivation for writing it. One interview quotes her as saying...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Devlin
After writing for television, AD
was drawn to live theatre because of the medium's relative freedom from censorship and its enduring qualities: It is Literature. When you create a character in the theatre you are...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
The protagonist of this book, ageing Francesca Stubbs, is employed as an inspector of retirement homes. She and the other characters here, witnessing the ends' of friends' lives and approaching their own, make sense of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
CBR
looked to Pound
for technique and Beckett
for morale, appreciating in each his obstinate humour in the face of despair.
qtd. in
Hayman, David, and Keith Cohen. “An Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose”. Contemporary Literature, Vol.
17
, No. 1, 1976, pp. 1-23.
14
She was also influenced by the French nouveau roman, especially the work of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Zoë Fairbairns
This time only, ZF
uses a male voice for a coming-of-age story, which holds up its narrator-protagonist to mockery and a kind of despairing sympathy, as it begins with some slight adolescent petulance and becomes...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
Influenced by Samuel Beckett
's Malone Dies, this novel perpetually delays action: We'll go on as if. As if for instance I were someone else, Cassandra perhaps.
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994.
118
Mira Enketei (from the Greek...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen
of a great German contemporary of Austen:...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna O'Brien
EOB
uses books as presiding spirits of her own writing. James Joyce
's image is at one end of the mantelpiece and Samuel Beckett
's at the other. . . . I write by hand...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Carson
AC
's contributions include rendering Fragment 286 by the Greek poet Ibykos
in the manner successively of various more modern voices: John Donne
, Samuel Beckett
, Franz Kafka
, an FBI
report on Bertolt Brecht
Timeline
1949: John Calder (Publishers) Limited was founded...
1955: Copies of Molloy by Samuel Beckett and Lolita...
Writing climate item
1955
Copies of Molloy by Samuel Beckett
and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
(both published in France) were seized by British Customs.
Craig, Alec. The Banned Books of England and Other Countries. George Allen and Unwin, 1962.
112
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
391-2
By early November 1973: Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson prefaced...
Writing climate item
By early November 1973
Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson
prefaced his short-story volume Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs? with a polemical critique listing only sixteen serious contemporary British writers.
Gordon, Giles. “Reading Ann Quin’s Berg”. Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture, 2001.
