Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction
...'s Love-Letters, An , Laurence Housman , 1900 , John Murray . This bestseller was at first published anonymously. ‘It need hardly be said,’ begins the preface to the first edition, ‘that the woman by whom these letters were written had no thought that they would be read by any one but the person to whom they were addressed.’ Housman's achievement was to maintain the note of disingenuousness for a further 300 pages. ‘It is you who make me think so much about myself, trying to find myself out,’ the heroine writes in her second letter to an unnamed...
An Englishwoman's Love-Letters
Laurence Housman
Housman, Laurence Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English
...Laurence ( 1865–1959 ), British writer , born near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, the brother of A. E. Housman ; he studied painting in London and became a highly regarded illustrator. His first successful publication was An Englishwoman's Love Letters ( 1900 ), an ingenious parody of romantic fiction. Trimblerigg: A Book of Revelation ( 1924 ), a comically effective political satire directed against Lloyd George , and The Duke of Flamborough ( 1924 ) are the best-known of his novels. The protagonists of his plays, collections of which include ...
Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther: Being the Letters of an Independent Woman Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction
...Being the Letters of an Independent Woman , ‘ Elizabeth ’, 1907 , Smith , Elder . A young Englishman, Roger Anstruther, comes to improve his German under an impoverished professor in Jena (he envisages a career in the Foreign Office), and falls in love, at the very last moment, with the daughter of the house, Rose-Marie. He returns to England. The book consists of Rose-Marie's letters to him, which reveal, after initial exhilaration, a dawning disillusionment, as she realises that he would prefer a more advantageous match to an Englishwoman, Nancy...
Housman, Laurence (1865–1959) Quick reference
The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (4 ed.)
... and dramatist , brother of A. E. Housman . He published many stories, for both children and adults, and wrote much on feminism and on socialist and pacifist themes. His work includes the somewhat derivative poems in Green Arras ( 1896 ) and Spikenard ( 1898 ); An Englishwoman's Love‐Letters ( 1900 ), which enjoyed some notoriety and was widely parodied; and several successful novels, among them a political satire, Trimblerigg ( 1924 ), directed against David Lloyd George . His first play, Bethlehem , was performed in 1902 . Some of his plays on...
Housman, Laurence (1865–1959) Reference library
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7 ed.)
...a number of books. He published many stories, for both children and adults, and wrote much on feminism and on socialist and pacifist themes. Among his works were volumes of somewhat derivative poems, including Green Arras ( 1896 ) and Spikenard ( 1898 ); An Englishwoman's Love‐Letters ( 1900 ), which enjoyed some notoriety and was widely parodied; and several successful novels, among them a political satire, Trimblerigg ( 1924 ), directed against David Lloyd George . His first play, Bethlehem , was performed in 1902 . Some of his plays on...
Chan-Toon, Mrs M. Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction
...in Burmah ( 1905 ), the tale of a disastrous marriage between an English girl and a Burmese lawyer brought up in Europe, which the preface states was designed to ‘show … how vast is the gulf that divides the Eastern from the Western’. He turns out vulgar, a liar, and an alcoholic; she leaves him and an unloved baby to return to England. Her second novel, Love Letters of an English Peeress to an Indian Prince ( 1912 ), concerns an imaginary and high-flown love affair between an Englishwoman and Nana Sahib. Leper and Millionaire ( 1910 ) is another ...
Pain, Barry Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction
...concerns the bitter feud between the family of the heroine, Linda Merle, and the frightening Judith Jennis, who owns a gigantic goat called Bel), and Pain the comic note. Pain's penchant for parody is evident in several works, notably Another Englishwoman's Love-Letters ( 1901 ), ( see An Englishwoman's Love-Letters ), Marge Askinfort ( 1920 ), a joke at the expense of Margot Asquith ( 1864–1945 ), and If Summer Don't ( 1922 ), which poked fun at A. S. M. Hutchinson 's bestseller If Winter Comes ( 1921 ). Other publications include collections of...
Foscolo, Ugo (1778–1827) Reference library
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7 ed.)
...of his generation who was most sensitive to the crisis of his age. In 1797 he wrote an ode to Bonaparte as Liberator, but when later that year Napoleon's Treaty of Campoformio handed over Venetian independence to the Austrians, Foscolo was bitter at the betrayal. Nevertheless he fought with the French throughout Napoleon's occupation of northern Italy. In 1804 , with the plan to invade England, he was stationed in northern France where he fell in love with an Englishwoman, by whom he had a daughter, ‘Floriana’. After Napoleon's defeat and the reoccupation of...
Sedgwick, Anne Douglas Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction
...her life in England and France, where she went as an 18-year-old to study painting. She married, rather suddenly and quietly (possibly because he had been married before), de Sélincourt, a critic, and lived at Chipping Norton in Gloucestershire for the rest of her life. She was deeply interested in philosophy. Her first published novel, The Dull Miss Archinard ( 1898 ), was based on a story she had told her sisters. Subsequent novels aim at cosmopolitanism. In The Rescue ( 1902 ) an exquisite Englishwoman elopes with a handsome, disreputable French painter...
Astell, Mary (1668–1731) Reference library
The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy
...autonomy of women outside (but not within) marriage. But some of Astell's more philosophical writings – Letters concerning the Love of God ( 1695 ) and The Christian Religion ( 1705 ) – are not directly concerned with feminist issues. And some of her most feminist writings – Some Reflections upon Marriage ( 1697 ) and A Serious Proposal to the Ladies , Part 1 ( 1694 ) – are more polemical than philosophical. Nonetheless she was the first Englishwoman to bring philosophy to the defence of women, as she does in A Serious Proposal , Part 2. The foundation...
Housman, Laurence Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction
...book was published in 1894 ; two years later the popularity of his brother's A Shropshire Lad ( 1896 ) overshadowed his own verses and tales, until the success of the anonymous An English-woman's Love-Letters ( 1900 ). This made him more than £2,000, which he called a ‘mighty windfall for the worst book I ever wrote’. In 1903 he and W. Somerset Maugham edited The Venture: An Annual of Art and Literature . He suffered as a playwright from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain: his play Bethlehem ( 1902 ) was banned and privately produced, as was ...
Men and Women of Letters Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment . Ithaca, N.Y., 1994. Feminist interpretation with major emphasis on role of salons and salonnières. Harth, Erica . Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime . Ithaca, N.Y., 1992. Hufton, Olwen . The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500–1800 . London, 1995; New York, 1996. Good chapter with extensive bibliography on women of letters within magisterial but highly readable survey. Jensen, Katharine Ann . Writing Love: Letters, Women,...
Duncan, Sara Jeannette (1861–1922) Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (2 ed.)
...Her first book, A social departure: how Orthodocia and I went round the world by ourselves (London and New York, 1890 ), is an edited version of her globe-trotting newspaper articles, unified by the invention of a naïve young Englishwoman as the narrator's companion. It has many lively episodes (particularly those dealing with Japan, a country Duncan found delightful), but is overlong and uneven. The more inventive and polished An American girl in London (London and New York, 1891 )—like its predecessor a collection of light sketches, which are here...
Taylor, Helen (1831–1907) Reference library
The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy
... Helen Taylor (1873). ‘Industrial Education for Ladies’, Englishwoman's Review (of Social and Industrial Questions) (January 1874). Mill, John Stuart , Three Essays on Religion, Nature, Utility of Religion, Theism , ed. Helen Taylor with Introductory Notice (October 1874). Preliminary Notice, in J. S. Mill , ‘Chapters on Socialism’, Fortnightly Review (January 1879). ‘Women's Rights as Preached by Women’, Westminster Review (October 1881). The Restoration of Their Homes to the People: An Appeal to Women (December 1889). Published as a pamphlet by...
Ondaatje, Michael (b. 1943) Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (2 ed.)
...as far as subject-matter, vision, and verbal texture are concerned. His books include as central characters a Victorian Englishwoman and convict ( The man with seven toes ), a nineteenth-century American outlaw ( Billy the Kid ), a New Orleans jazz musician of the turn of the century ( Coming through slaughter ), and a Hindu bomb-disposal expert and a Hungarian flier ( The English patient ). His style, owing almost nothing to an indigenous Canadian tradition, shows the influence of Wallace Stevens and of contemporary cinema artists, especially Louis...
Queen Elizabeth I Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
...I, more than any other Englishwoman, left an additional legacy. Although Elizabeth and the men surrounding her argued that her abilities and social position separated her irrevocably from other women, generations have turned to her as a figure who demonstrates the potential of women to succeed not only as writers and politicians, but in any field they choose. Editions Bradner, Leicester , ed. Poems of Elizabeth I . Providence, RI, 1964. Earlier, less authoritative edition of the poems. Harrison, G. B. , ed. The Letters of Queen Elizabeth . New York,...
Female Philosophers Reference library
The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy
...including the Philosophical Letters ( 1664 ) and Grounds of Natural Philosophy ( 1668 ). A generation later, in 1693 , Mary Astell initiated a correspondence with the Malebranchean philosopher, John Norris , by asserting that ‘though I can't pretend to a Multitude of Books, Variety of Languages, the Advantages of Academical Education, or any Helps but what my own Curiosity afford; yet, Thinking is a Stock that no Rational Creature can want, if they know but how to use it’ ( Letters , p. 2). In Letters Concerning the Love of God ( 1695 ), she...
Macaulay, Catherine (1731–91) Reference library
The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy
...France in the mid-1770s ( 1775 and 1777 ) she was received by leading philosophes , including Turgot and Marmontel . But she had already begun to be ridiculed. As the first Englishwoman to write a major work of history, she excited masculine jealousy. After the death of her husband in 1766 , she became much more vulnerable to social intrigue. In 1774 she moved to Bath where an elderly admirer, Dr Thomas Wilson , invited her to reside with him. He was sufficiently besotted to commission a statue of her as Clio. Abandoning her initial intention to take...
