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

Romer Wilson

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During a brief writing career (almost entirely limited to the 1920s) RW wrote produced novels, two novellas, a play, a biography, and a posthumously published collection of short stories. She compiled and edited three volumes...

John Strange Winter

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Best known for her early military fiction, JSW (nom de plume of Henrietta Palmer, later Stannard) was a prolific and popular author of over a hundred novels and volumes of short stories. Writing in the...
John Strange Winter Black and white, oval photograph of John Strange Winter. Her face is in profile, her body turned a little to the right. Her curly hair is styled in a fringe in front and a bun behind. She is wearing a black dress with a tulle-like fabric at the neck. Her signature is reproduced below: "Ever yours, H. E. V. Stannard".

Jeanette Winterson

JW , writing in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, has been acclaimed by some critics and savaged by others for her provocative and outspoken novels, in which she uncompromisingly confronts cultural notions of...
Jeanette Winterson Photograph of Janette Winterson taken in Warsaw, Poland, on 16 February 2005 by Mariusz Kubik. She has her lips parted, and is apparently speaking into a microphone . She has short, brown,curly hair and wear a black t-shirt with a seahorse logo.

Jane Wiseman

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As an unmarried woman, on the fringes of a London network of professional writers in the early eighteenth century, JW produced poetry and letters, gallant in tone, and a tragedy that reached the stage. After...

Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan

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EPW , writing in the early nineteenth century, was a poet and translator whose fables, fairy tales, and narrative poems displayed her skill, charm, and range. An anonymous novel of 1796 has only recently been...

Hannah Wolley

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HW predates Aphra Behn in making a living by her pen, only in her case her seventeenth-century writings (on cooking, medicine, household skills, and general conduct) aimed to attract students to her other career, which...

Mary Wollstonecraft

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MW has a distinguished historical place as a feminist: as theorist, critic and reviewer, novelist, and especially as an activist for improving women's place in society. She also produced pedagogy or conduct writing, an anthology...
Mary Wollstonecraft Stipple engraving of Mary Wollstonecraft by James Heath after the painting by John Opie. She is wearing a light, loosely-fitting gown with high waist and a folded cap like a turban.

Ellen Wood

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In a writing career spanning most of the second half of the nineteenth century, EW produced a prodigious body of work (often writing two triple-deckers per year), including sketches, novels, and a series of interconnected...
Ellen Wood Photo of a painting of Ellen Wood by Sydney Hodges. Wood is seated on a red chair gazing straight at the viewer. Her left hand holds a book; she is wearing a blue dress with lace trim around the sleeves and neck, and a lighter blue bow around the collar. Her cap has a broad, sheer ribbon running down from it. She wears a necklace, and a ring on her right index finger. A window behind her opens on a mountain landscape.

Emma Caroline Wood

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ECW did not begin her publishing career until past the age of sixty. Then, following her husband's death, she produced an average of a book a year, to almost exclusively negative reviews. The publications included...

Sophia Woodfall

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SW , whose career was in acting, published two interesting novels during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Some lines of poetry in one of them are probably her own.

A. Woodfin

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AW began publishing her six novels just after the middle of the eighteenth century. She favoured the briefer, two-volume format and innovative structures and plots. Her final novel closes with verse. At least two of...
A. Woodfin Title-page of A. Woodfin's "The Auction: A Modern Novel", vol. 1, anonymous 1760.

Virginia Woolf

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Thousands of readers over three or four generations have known that Virginia Woolf was—by a beadle—denied access to the library of a great university. They may have known, too, that she was a leading intellect...
Virginia Woolf Well-known black and white photograph of Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), 1902. She is seen in profile, with her hair loosely caught back in a bun

Emma Jane Worboise

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EJW was a prolific Victorian novelist who wrote didactic and often sensational tales on domestic, courtship, evangelical, ecumenical (within Protestantism), and anti-Catholic themes. Apart from her nearly fifty novels, she published a book of hymns...
Emma Jane Worboise Colour scan of the cover of Clarissa by Emma Jane Worboise, 1800

Dorothy Wordsworth

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DW is chiefly remembered for her Romantic-period journals, especially for her descriptions of the detail of nature, landscape, growth, and seasonal change. The journals, however, are equally remarkable for observing the doings of people: both...
Dorothy Wordsworth Image of Dorothy Wordsworth from a painting by S. Crosthwaite, 1833, at Rydal Mount, Cumbria (home of herself and her brother's family during all of her later life). All that can be clearly seen of her clothing is a cap with ruffled edges and a large bow, and a scarf or shawl. She looks directly at the viewer. The lower part of the portrait, not visible here, shows spectacles and an open manuscript book on her lap and a little white dog at her feet.

Frances Wright

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FW was a writer in many genres: her œuvre includes a tragedy and a philosophical essay, but is dominated by political and feminist social critique, much of it taking the apparently ephemeral forms of lectures...
Frances Wright Portrait of Frances Wright by Henry Inman, 1824. She is looking to the left, plainly dressed in black with a red and white scarves, her brown, curly, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle.

Mehetabel Wright

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MH is a lyric poet whose depth of passion, in her few surviving pieces, is remarkable. As far as posterity is concerned she was silenced, if not directly by her family, then by their embarrassment...

Susanna Wright

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SW , early American poet and woman of letters, was writing throughout the middle years of the eighteenth century. She did not preserve her letters or poems, and comparatively few have survived, though the known...
Susanna Wright First page of Susanna Wright's "Directions for the management of Silk-Worms", posthumously printed in the "Philadelphia Physical and Medical Journal", 1 (1804): 103, with editorial praise of Wright's life and work.

Lady Mary Wroth

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LMW achieved two firsts with a single publication in 1621: the first full-length fiction (a prose romance) to be written in English by a woman and the first sonnet sequence in English by a woman...
Lady Mary Wroth Full-length portrait of Lady Mary Wroth attributed to John de Critz the elder, c. 1620. She stands holding a theorbo that reaches to her shoulder, in a picture with striking touches of red. Wroth's stiff, embroidered gown and large, transparent ruff are pale; her petticoat and belt are red, and her arms, shoulders, and bust are picked out with red bows. She rests an arm of a red sofa, with red curtains behind.

Ann Yearsley

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AY became famous at the outset of her career as a primitive or untaught poet: a role she herself rejected in the course of a bitter row with her patron Hannah More . She went...
Ann Yearsley Sepia version of engraving of Ann Yearsley by Wilson Lowry, 1787, from an unknown artist. She is turned 3/4 to the left and wears a large shady hat, jacket, and dress. The portrait has an oval frame embellished with flowers, ribbons, and an urn. Underneath is written "Ann Yearsley. The Bristol Milk Woman & Poetess."