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 July 2007. For more information on Orlando visit http://www.cambridge.org/online/orlandoonline
New Author Entries
- Elizabeth Shirley, 1566 – 1641, author of the earliest first-hand biography of an Englishwoman
- Mary Fisher, 1623? – 1698, early Quaker activist remembered for preaching to the Sultan
- Helen Craik, c. 1751 – 1825, Scottish poet and novelist, friend of Robert Burns
- Catherine Cuthbertson, fl. 1802 – 1830, novelist who had great success with the Gothic Romance of the Pyrenees, [1802]
- Mary Ann Kelty, 1789 – 1873, novelist, life-writer, religious writer, early admirer of Jane Austen
- Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 1789 – 1867, “one of nineteenth-century America’s most prolific and versatile women writers”
- Harriet Smythies, 1813? – 1883, poet and prolific novelist of courtship and social satire
- Roxburghe Lothian, 1819 – 1876, author of a novel about Dante and Beatrice, and an extraordinary romance based on her own life
- Frances E. W. Harper, 1825 – 1911, “first African-American woman of letters,” activist on behalf of emancipation and the rights of woman
- Jessie Ellen Cadell, 1844 – 1884, novelist and translator of Omar Khayyám
- Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844 – 1911, US novelist, journalist, and writer in women’s causes
- Christina Fraser-Tytler, 1848 – 1927, Scottish poet and novelist, remembered for her portrayal of working-class characters
- Sarah Orne Jewett, 1849 – 1909, novelist of New England
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850 – 1919, best-selling US poet: facile, sentimental, lively, memorable
- Mary Cholmondeley, 1859 – 1925, writer of popular fiction with links to the New Woman movement
- George Egerton, 1859 – 1945, woman of letters, precursor of Modernism, outspoken about female sexuality
- Edith Lyttelton, c. 1865 – 1948, dramatist and writer of politically inflected prose (biography, travel, books on parapsychology)
- John Oliver Hobbes, 1867 – 1906, novelist, playwright, and essayist, whose career moved from epigrammatic wit to religious feeling
- Colette, 1873 – 1954, novelist, dramatist, autobiographer, and journalist, first Frenchwoman to be honoured with a state funeral
- Romer Wilson, 1891 – 1930, philosophical novelist, briefly hailed for exceptional originality
- Frances Horovitz, 1938 – 1983, broadcaster and poet of landscape and personal feeling
- Jeni Couzyn, born 1942, South African-British-Canadian poet and feminist anthologist
- Sally Purcell, 1944 – 1998, poet, scholar, and translator
- Claire Luckham, born 1944, feminist dramatist for stage and radio: began with analysis of contemporary gender politics and went on to dramatise the lives of historical women
- Jo Shapcott, born 1953, poet whose first retrospective collection, 2000, was hailed for “formative significance” and for “rewriting the English poetic canon”
Other Additions
224 new free-standing chronology entries
218 existing author entries were also updated or enhanced. 100 free-standing chronology entries were also updated or enhanced
minor technological improvements
Summary of Content
25 entries (16 British women writers, 9 other women writers – listed twice if their nationality shifted); 224 free-standing chronology entries; 673 bibliographical listings; 62,383 tags; 206,491 words (exclusive of tags)