New Author Entries
- Ann Fisher, 1719-78, grammarian (uniquely for a woman at this date) and educational writer.
- Margaret Holford the elder, ?1757-1834, novelist and playwright: mother of a poet of the same name, one of whose works is still often wrongly ascribed to her.
- Margaret Holford the younger (later Holford), 1778-1852, poet whose first romance narrative gave her a fame not equalled by her later poetry, fiction, or play, or her earlier Oriental tale, despite her tireless efforts to further her career.
- Ada Cambridge, 1844-1926, English-Australian poet, novelist, and autobiographer. One of Australia’s earliest poets, and a significant chronicler of colonial Australia.
- Lucy Walford, 1845-1915, novelist and short-story writer, Scottish but settled in London, creator of feisty heroines who are typically tamed by experience.
- Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936, short-story writer, poet, children’s writer, and journalist who also produced novels, political writing, and an autobiography. Chiefly known, to the detriment of his once immense popularity, as the depictor of British India.
- Roma White, 1866-1930 (real name Blanche Oram, later Winder), popular novelist who often sets her stories in the theatre world or in exotic distant countries.
- Arnold Bennett, 1867-1931, literary and popular novelist and miscellaneous writer. Remembered as a leader of the school of realist fiction, especially for his works set in the Potteries of Staffordshire.
- Ruby M. Ayres, 1883-1955. Popular romantic novelist whose phenomenal sales (of at least 150 novels written at a rate of up to 20,000 words a day) continued with new reprints in the late twentieth century.
- Gladys Henrietta Schütze, 1884-1946, novelist and miscellaneous writer whose almost total oblivion must surely be due to the foreign name which harrassed her in her lifetime and inspired her most famous work, Mrs. Fischer’s War, 1930.
- Hélène Barcynska, ?1886-1964. Popular novelist who turned to autobiography and memoir after her exceptional output and popularity began to decline as tastes changed.
Entries Enhanced
Entries enhanced (not listed here are the entries, among them those on Anna Letitia Barbauld, Catherine Carswell, Elizabeth Heyrick, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Susannah Watts, which have been transformed by use of recent biographies):
- Margaret Atwood. Not only her latest novel but her up-to-the-minute publicizing of it.
- E. M. Delafield. The baffled reception of her hit comedy To See Ourselves in Sofia, Bulgaria.
- Lucie Duff Gordon. The publication (and cutting-edge marketing) of a novel which is based on her travel experiences but which paints an unfriendly picture of her, Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing, July 2009.
- Carol Ann Duffy. Some of her activities as Poet Laureate.
- Maria Edgeworth and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck The appearance in the sale room of the latter’s copy of the former’s Castle Rackrent.
- Celia Fiennes. Entry revised in light of research by Frank Parker: contrary to standard sources, she was younger than her one surviving sister.
- Sarah Stickney Ellis. A previously unknown broadside printing of her poem to raise money for a new chapel in Hoddesdon, 1846.
- U. A. Fanthorpe: at the time of her death she was being backed for the laureateship by Duffy, the successful candidate.
- Samuel Johnson: the extraordinary career of La Princesse de Cléves as a symbol of resistance to French university cuts, precipitated by snide comments on the novel from President Nicolas Sarkozy.
- Eliza Lynn Linton: a letter offered for sale in which she thanks “Mark Rutherford” for his good opinion of her controversial novel Joshua Davidson.
- Sylvia Plath: more on her relationship with Ruth Fainlight; her son’s suicide.
- Anne Stevenson: more on her contact with Ted Hughes over her life of Sylvia Plath.
- Sylvia Townsend Warner: now quoted, a late, irresistible passage from Lolly Willowes.
Other Additions
60 contextual events were updated or enhanced.
87 new free-standing contextual events on topics connected with new author entries, from seventeenth-century Scottish religion and politics, through the nineteenth-century anarchist movement, to the twentieth-century campaign for women’s ordination. Others relate to printing and publishing, changing views on women’s nature and status, publications by writers of both sexes who do not for the moment rate a whole entry, and other aspects of politics, literature, and cultural change.
Summary of Content
25 entries (21 British women writers, 4 other women writers—listed twice if their nationality shifted—and 2 male writers); 87 free-standing chronology entries; 624 bibliographical listings; 51,775 tags; 197,856 words (exclusive of tags).