Writers with Entries: January 2007 update

Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is an on-line cultural history generated from the lives and works of women writers. The materials listed below were added to Orlando in January 2007.  For more information on Orlando visit http://www.cambridge.org/online/orlandoonline

New Author Entries

  • Anne Locke, c. 1533 – maybe c. 1593, probable author of earliest sonnet sequence in English
  • Elizabeth Moody, perhaps early 1740s – 1814, poet and early periodical reviewer
  • Henrietta Maria Bowdler, 1750 – 1830, the true inventor of bowdlerising Shakespeare
  • Anne Grant, 1755 – 1838, Scottish woman of letters, huge networker, author of book on colonial New York province
  • Selina Bunbury, 1802 – 82, whose “writings display a loving and respectful preoccupation with female characters and themes”
  • Fanny Fern, 1811 – 72, one of the most popular US writers of the nineteenth century
  • Sarah Tytler, 1827 – 1914, prolific Scottish author of domestic and often historical novels
  • Isabella Bird, 1831 – 1904, prominent late-Victorian travel writer
  • Kate Chopin, 1850 – 1904, US feminist writer particularly well-known for The Awakening
  • John Strange Winter, 1856 – 1911, popular for her military novels, unusual for a woman
  • Katharine Tynan, 1859 – 1931, leading figure in the Irish Literary Revival
  • George Paston, 1860 – 1936, feminist novelist and playwright, biographer, and writer on women’s literary history
  • Victoria Cross, 1868 – 1952, whose writing rebels against the sexual and other conventions of her own day, yet has remained unfashionable in later generations
  • Eleanor Rathbone, 1872 – 1946, conservative feminist, crucial proponent of family allowances, described as one of the leading politicians of the early twentieth century
  • Enid Bagnold, 1889 – 1981, novelist and playwright
  • Willa Muir, 1890 – 1970, Scottish writer and translator (most famously of Kafka), overshadowed by her poet husband
  • Mary Butts, 1890 – 1937, modernist novelist, poet, and autobiographer
  • Muriel Box, 1905 – 91, playwright, film-writer, first British woman film director, and author of a feminist post-nuclear science fiction
  • Una Marson, 1905 – 65, Jamaican woman of letters and publicist in Britain of Caribbean culture, early proponent of global feminism and black female identity
  • Jean Plaidy, 1906 – 93, immensely popular author of over 200 novels under seven pseudonyms, best-known for historical romance
  • Mollie Panter-Downes, 1906 – 97, author of a novel which has been called one of the best in the twentieth century
  • Marghanita Laski, 1915 – 88, woman of letters and public intellectual
  • Penelope Mortimer, 1918 – 99, novelist and writer in many genres
  • Elizabeth Jane Howard, born 1923, best-known as a novelist and autobiographer
  • Ann Jellicoe, born 1927, innovative playwright and pioneer of huge-cast community theatre
  • Nawal El Saadawi, born 1931, Egyptian feminist writer and voice for Islamic women
  • Antonia Fraser, born 1932, historical biographer (particularly of women) and detective-story writer
  • Rose Tremain, born 1943, novelist
  • Anne Devlin, born 1951, Belfast-born playwright

New Life Screens

  • Margaret Tyler, first woman in England to publish a romance and the first English translator direct from Spanish romance, in the later sixteenth century
  • Jane Owen, Roman Catholic religious writer of the seventeenth century
  • Lady Margaret Cunningham, remarkable early seventeenth-century Scottish autobiographer and religious writer
  • Mary Fage, earlier seventeenth-century author of anagrams and acrostics on the names of the British establishment
  • Judith Man, who in 1640 translated, abridged, and published her version of a popular Latin heroic romance
  • Elizabeth Avery, religious polemicist and autobiographer of the mid-seventeenth century
  • Susanna Parr, mid-seventeenth-century religious apologist and polemicist
  • Frances Boothby, the sole woman to have a play produced in a public theatre before Aphra Behn
  • Elizabeth Tipper, late-seventeenth-century poet and journalist
  • Sarah Davy, later-seventeenth-century Independent or Baptist autobiographer
  • Barbara Blaugdone, later seventeenth-century Quaker minister and autobiographer
  • Sarah Butler, Irish writer who produced, in the early eighteenth century, tales from legendary national history under the guise of fiction
  • Ann Cook, mid-eighteenth-century author of an imaginative cookery-book which includes poetry, and story-telling
  • Marianne Chambers, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novelist and dramatist
  • Mrs. F. C. Patrick, Irish novelist of the 1790s
  • Anne Burke, successful novelist who began publishing at the end of the eighteenth century
  • Frances O’Neill, Irish poet of the later eighteenth and very early nineteenth century
  • Charlotte Nooth, author during the early nineteenth century of poetry, a remarkable novel, and a translation of a text against racial prejudice

Other Additions

214 new free-standing chronology entries on such contextual matters as:

  • the Iliad
  • the Olympic Games
  • the British national postal service
  • bank notes
  • the appointment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi as professor of mathematics in 1750
  • street lighting
  • Madame Tussaud’s
  • Reuter’s news service
  • the coinage of the word “allergy”
  • Grace Annie Lockhart’s attainment of the first university degree by a woman in the British Empire
  • Annie Jump Cannon’s receipt of the first honorary doctorate by a woman from Oxford University
  • the British Socialist Party
  • the Greenham Common women’s peace camp
  • the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi of Iran

138 existing author entries were also updated or enhanced. 143 free-standing chronology entries were also updated or enhanced.

Summary of Content

29 entries (26 British women writers, 3 other women writers – listed twice if their nationality shifted); 18 life screens; 198 free-standing chronology entries; 821 bibliographical listings; 83,282 tags; 289,619 words (exclusive of tags)

Leave a Comment