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Rebekah Hyneman’s The Black Izba: The Moscovite Jews and the Tzar’s Jewish Doctor’s Triumph over an Anti-Semitic Plot Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Irina Rabinovich
Rebekah Hyneman, born in Pennsylvania in 1816, played a significant role in documenting Jewish existence. Beyond her unique historical novel, The Black Izba: A Tale of Ancient Russia,1 serialized i...
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“Here doth Shee Mourne:” Epitaphic Compulsion in Isabella Whitney’s Lament upon William Gruffith’s Death Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Debapriya Basu
This essay argues that “The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman vpon the death of her late deceased frend William Gruffith Gent.” in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), attributed to Isabel...
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New Directions in Criticism on Isabella Whitney Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Danielle Clarke
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 31, No. 1, 2024)
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Isabella Whitney and George Turberville: Mid-Tudor Heroidean Poetry and Questions of Precedence Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Lindsay Ann Reid
Scholarship on Isabella Whitney often positions her in relation to George Turberville. Her Copy of a Letter is habitually juxtaposed with—and oftentimes assumed to derive from—Turberville’s Heroyca...
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How Isabella Whitney read “Her” Christine de Pizan Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Michelle O’Callaghan
This essay provides the first evidence that Isabella Whitney read and imitated Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au Dieu d’Amours through Thomas Hoccleve’s 1402 translation in his Letter of Cupid, first...
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Isabella Whitney’s Bruised Brain: Taking Care of the Mind in Elizabethan Poetic Posies Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Douglas Clark
Sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers were preoccupied with reflecting on the nature of the mind. A vast array of authors seized upon the opportunities offered by new and established literary g...
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“I Walked Out”: Perambulatory Poetics, Authorial Independence, and Isabella Whitney’s Poetic Voice in A Sweet Nosgay Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Anna-Rose Shack
The act of walking energizes the formation of Isabella Whitney’s poetic voice in her second volume of verse, A Sweet Nosgay (pub. 1573). Walking out of her house, trespassing in Plat’s garden, and ...
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The Reading, Reception, and Collecting of Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, c.1573–1871 Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull
Much recent scholarship on early modern women’s writing has focussed on their marginalia. Yet how active readers responded to their printed work after it left the bookseller’s stall has remained la...
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Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Trish Bredar
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Visions of the East: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Memoirs of Crimean War Nurses Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Diana Moore
The article examines the memoirs of four women who provided nursing care in the Crimean War: Mary Seacole, Elizabeth Davis, Martha Nicol and Fanny Margaret Taylor. It argues that these memoirs are ...
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A Neglected Fact of Armenian History and Culture in Constantinople in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: Elpis Kesaratsian and the Magazine Guitar (1861–1863) Women's Writing Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Naira Hambardzumyan
This article focuses on Elpis Kesaratsian (1830–1913), the first Armenian female editor who founded and published the Guitar magazine (1861–63) but has been neglected in the field of Armenian histo...
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“Spain is a Contradiction”: Katharine Lee Bates’ Quest for Modernity in Spanish Highways and Byways Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Sara Prieto
This article explores Katharine Lee Bates’ travel book Spanish Highways and Byways (1900), written out of a collection of commissioned articles published in the New York Times immediately after the...
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Unradical Feminisms: Whitney and the World of Women’s Work Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore
Isabella Whitney is often celebrated as the first professional woman English writer. Such “firsts”, however, are sticky—a matter of shifting data and definitions. More importantly, a focus on a “fi...
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Poetry of the New Woman: Public Concerns, Private Matters Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Sarah Parker
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Editing the Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Challenges of Authorship Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Jade Scott
This article addresses the challenges of attributing authorship to Mary, Queen of Scots, when editing her letters. It demonstrates how editing Mary’s letters offers evidence for reading early moder...
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“[An] old battle constantly re-fought”: Why Language Matters when Editing Early Modern Women’s Letters: A Case Study Of the Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489–1541) Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Helen Newsome
Through a case study of the holograph letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489–1541), this article examines the centuries-old editorial debate of whether to modernise or preserve the old-spe...
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On Translating and Editing the “Star of Utrecht”: The Autograph Letters of Anna Maria Van Schurman (1601–78) to André Rivet and Constantijn Huygens Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Anne R. Larsen, Steve Maiullo
This article explores the challenges we faced when translating and editing the autograph letters of Anna Maria Van Schurman that span four decades from 1631 to 1669. Van Schurman was regarded as th...
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Anna Maria van Schurman: Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Felicity Lyn Maxwell
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 30, No. 4, 2023)
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Introduction Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Ann-Maria Walsh, Ramona Wray
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 30, No. 4, 2023)
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“The vast ocean of infinity & eternity”: Creating the (In)finite Archive of The Elizabeth Montagu’s Correspondence Online (EMCO)* Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Nicole Pohl
This article explores the complexities of creating an archive – in our case, a digital archive of eighteenth-century manuscript letters, The Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO). Elizabet...
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A Devolutionary Approach to Editing the Letters of the First Duchess of Ormonde Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Naomi McAreavey
“To devolve”, explains John Kerrigan, “is to shift power in politics or scholarly analysis from a locus that has been disproportionately endowed with influence and documentation to sites that are d...
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The Correspondence of Elizabeth Butler, Duchess of Ormonde Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Hannah Gregg
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 30, No. 4, 2023)
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Editing Gender, Language and Family in the Letters of the Seventeenth-Century Boyle Women Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Ann-Maria Walsh
The seventeenth-century Boyle women were members of a noble Protestant family with vast lands and powerful ties stretching across Ireland, Britain and Europe. Three hundred and eighty-four of the w...
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Editing what is Lost: Histories, Metatexts and the Extant Letters of Elizabeth Cary Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Ramona Wray
This article argues that the editorial history of Elizabeth Cary’s letters has powerfully influenced how the letters are read and understood today. In particular, it suggests that an editorial orga...
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“Bitter Memory” Meets “Dark Retrospect”: Charlotte Smith, Satan, and the Politics of Nostalgia in The Emigrants Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Diana Little
Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants (1793), a blank verse critique of Revolutionary France during the Terror, probes the unstable connections between sentiment, nostalgia, and political will, especiall...
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The Letters in the Story: Narrative-Epistolary Fiction from Aphra Behn to the Victorians Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Crystal Biggin
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Virginia Woolf and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers: Victorian Legacies and Literary Afterlives Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Pengfei Zhang
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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“A Very Equal Well-Proportion’d Pair”: Creative Collaboration in the Careers of Restoration Actress, Mrs Norris, and Playwright, Aphra Behn Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Cora James
ABSTRACT Despite a career spanning twenty-five years little is known about one of England’s earliest professional actresses. Drawing upon new archival evidence, this study reveals the biographical details of a woman cited in cast lists as “Mrs Norris” as early as 1662. Not only was Norris the matriarch of an acting family that held a presence on the stage until 1737, she also won “considerable applause”
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“Quiet & Clever Together”: Reassessing the Significance of Elite Women and the Literary Culture of the Country House Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Jemima Hubberstey
ABSTRACT This article examines elite women’s agency and participation in the literary life of the country house, focusing on the circle that centred on Jemima Marchioness Grey and her husband, Philip Yorke, at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. The “Society at Wrest” was an exclusive group of close friends and family that included Grey’s childhood friends, Mary Gregory (née Grey) and Catherine Talbot, as
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Women Writers and the Creative Arts in Great Britain, 1660–1830 Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Claudine van Hensbergen, Hannah Moss
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 30, No. 3, 2023)
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From Honour to Honesty: Desiring eyes in Aphra Behn’s Poetry and Sir Peter Lely's Portraiture Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Claudine van Hensbergen
ABSTRACT This essay casts new light on Aphra Behn’s poetry and practice by exploring her preoccupation with human eyes. Behn repeatedly references eyes as objects in her verse, whilst also evoking the visual senses through the use of related verbs and metaphors. I argue that to better understand Behn’s fixation with eyes we need to look beyond her verse to visual culture of the period, especially to
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Not just a Pretty Face: Women’s Heroic Experience in The Heroides, Book Illustration & Mural Painting in Britain, 1700–1720 Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Lydia Hamlett
ABSTRACT This essay examines a particular transmedial moment in the early eighteenth century which promoted the agency of women as heroines at the heart of classical narratives. Opening with a case study of Aphra Behn’s contribution and evolving place within John Dryden’s influential edition of Ovid’s Heroides, I show how later illustrative engravings came to prioritise, and productively extend, Behn’s
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Epic “apply’d”: Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall” and the Epic Mode Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Anthony Walker-Cook
ABSTRACT Women’s involvement in the reception history of the epic genre is largely unwritten. This article explores how women writers of the period used the mock heroic to write of their own histories and experiences. I propose that three distinct developments in the eighteenth-century literary landscape influenced the engagement of women writers with epic: an increasing confidence to enter the works
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Sculpting Emotion: Female Passion and the Paratextual Framing of Felicia Hemans’s “Properzia Rossi” (1828) Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Hannah Moss
ABSTRACT On the surface, “Properzia Rossi” (1828) may be a poem about unrequited love, but more importantly it works to raise the status of women’s work through the reciprocal relationship established between the sister arts of poetry and sculpture. This article aims to further the discussion surrounding Hemans’s ekphrastic poetry by analysing the paratextual framing of “Properzia Rossi”, and interrogate
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Controversy and the Hostile Reader: The Appeal of George Anne Bellamy’s Apology Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Leah Orr
ABSTRACT This essay examines the ways that controversial texts were read by reader-critics who sought to engage with their reading in new ways in the eighteenth century. It takes as its primary example An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy (1785), the autobiography of a woman actor in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Bellamy was praised for her sentiment but criticized for her representation
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“She Has an Activity of Mind that Never Lets Her be Idle”: Mary Delany, the Enlightenment, and the Creative Arts Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Kristina Decker
ABSTRACT Mary Delany (1700-1788) is most famous for her “paper mosaicks”, a collection of botanically accurate flower collages that are now held by the British Museum. These collages lie at the intersection of art and science, feminine accomplishment and Enlightenment and were the culmination of a life spent engaging with these topics. Yet often the importance of Delany’s earlier creative and intellectual
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“For Good or for Evil”: Abortion and Reproductive Ethics in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Emily K. Cody
ABSTRACT This article considers how questions of reproduction and population intersect with issues of working-class motherhood in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 social problem novel Mary Barton — specifically regarding representations of abortion and women's reproductive health. Women’s ability to successfully perform maternity, especially for multiple children, often correlated with their socioeconomic
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Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing Women's Writing Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Miriam Al Jamil
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Picturing Sympathy: Felicia Hemans’s Portraits and Portrait Poems Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Theresa Adams
ABSTRACT This article situates Felicia Hemans’s portrait poems in the context of the sentimental portrait poem genre and the conditions of reception created by the literary annuals. By suggesting that all images are subject to interpretation and that all interpretations are expressions of the viewer’s desires, Hemans challenges the sentimental portrait poems’ insistence that portraits transparently
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Introduction Women’s Writings about Illness and Disease Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Jennifer Evans, Sara Read
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 29, No. 4, 2022)
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Colonialism and Disease in Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Two Voyages to Sierra Leone Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Pamela Buck
ABSTRACT Anna Maria Falconbridge’s 1794 travel journal Two Voyages to Sierra Leone documents Britain’s resettlement of formerly enslaved people to Sierra Leone and the endemic disease and high rates of mortality that beset the colony. This essay argues that Falconbridge employs the authority of medical discourse to criticize British colonialism in West Africa. Advocating for disease prevention, she
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“She Resolutely Refuses to See a Doctor”: Re-reading Emily Brontë and Tuberculosis in 1848; or Charlotte Brontë, Sickness and Correspondence Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Claire O’Callaghan
ABSTRACT This article reads Charlotte Brontë’s letters documenting her sister Emily Brontë’s experience of tuberculosis in late 1848, considering how the correspondence has cultivated a one-sided account of Emily’s final months. Rereading the letters analytically, I argue that the differences between the sisters that Charlotte articulates gravitate around her implicit conception of the “good” consumptive
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Being good, doing good, making others look good: Reconceptualising nineteenth-century nursing practice Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Tanya Langtree
ABSTRACT The discourse that surrounds nineteenth-century nursing is dominated by Florence Nightingale’s work to transform nursing from being a disreputable job performed by uneducated drunkards to that of an acceptable vocation for single women. Much of the reverence for Nightingale as the founder of modern nursing are based on half-truths found within E.T. Cook’s (1913) biography, The Life of Florence
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Where is Frances Burney? Irony, Free Indirect Discourse, and the Cultural Critic in Cecilia Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Oren M. Abeles
ABSTRACT While recent studies often praise Frances Burney’s novels for their irreverent social criticism, many see Burney’s second novel Cecilia as a more perplexing work. Although its eponymous protagonist seems to embody Burney’s intellectual and moral independence, Burney submits Cecilia to humiliation and dispossession, leading some critics to view the novel as ambiguous or flawed. Such readings
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“Domestic Houseflies” and “Giant Cucumbers”: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Literary Criticism and Women Writers of the Long Eighteenth Century Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Fauve Vandenberghe
ABSTRACT Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) is frequently considered the single most influential work that helped establish feminist literary criticism as a discipline. It continues to be a key feminist text today: scholars avidly debate how Woolf's criticism instigated, but also thwarted and distorted, the study of women's literary history. Apart from A Room, Woolf also engaged extensively
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Romantic-Era Irish Women Poets in English Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Mary Chadwick
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2022)
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Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Michaela Vance
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2022)
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Women (Re)Writing Milton Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Anthony Walker-Cook
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2023)
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“Linton had a Very Restless Night”: Sleeplessness in the Sickroom, 1783 Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-10-07 Frances Long
ABSTRACT On 11 May 1783, Lady Mary Traquair “went to Bed for ye first night, had not been in Bed for 12 nights before,” because she had been nursing her son, Charles, Lord Linton, who was inoculated against smallpox in late April. In this anxious period, Lady Traquair quarrelled with the inoculator; adapted prescribed drug regimens; lost the little trust she had in the nursemaid; and tracked Linton’s
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Florence Marryat Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-09-19 Pam Lock
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2022)
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Virginia Woolf and Poetry Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Alison Daniell
Published in Women's Writing (Ahead of Print, 2022)
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Medical obstacles and eugenic solutions in Arabella Kenealy’s The Mating of Anthea (1911) Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-09-12 Fatima Borrmann
ABSTRACT Eugenics told many stories. A story of a degenerative present, a story of a dystopian future and, more importantly, a story of how to avert this perceived imminent decay. Put together, these stories read like an unraveling of a linear plot, with a suspended conclusion. At the same time, eugenicists liked to constantly highlight the scientific foundations of their theory. In the “science” of
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“[A]n Imaginary Feast”: Hospitality and Health in Margaret Cavendish’s Alimentary Poetics Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-09-08 Christine Jacob
ABSTRACT As previous scholarship has observed, Margaret Cavendish’s ambitious intellectual project—spanning subjects as dissimilar as fairies and fevers—is driven by fancy, an inherently speculative mode of thought, and her correlation of fancy to women’s work is a stratagem that licenses her writing. Beginning with the evocative image of Cavendish as the host(ess) of “an Imaginary Feast,” however
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“Every Rascally Scribbler”: Mary Davys’s Novel Innovations in a Newly Identified Pseudonymous Text, Love and Friendship (1718) Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Hamish John Wood
ABSTRACT In important accounts of Mary Davys’s short epistolary work Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), Riley (1995) and Wakely (2005) suggest Davys subverts the amatory mode through its Whig, and feminist, inversion of the Tory seduction narrative. This paper’s identification of an early edition of the text, printed for J. Roberts, and attributed to the pseudonym “Dick Fisher”
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Irish Women Poets Rediscovered: Readings in Poetry from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century and A History of Irish Women’s Poetry Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Pauline Harrison
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2023)
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Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Gender Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Ashleigh Blackwood
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2023)
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Introduction: Spiritualism and the Supernatural, 1870–1925 Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Zoe Brennan, Emma Liggins, Gina Wisker
Published in Women's Writing (Vol. 29, No. 2, 2022)
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Gender, Space, and the Female Spiritualist in Rhoda Broughton’s “Behold, it was a Dream!” (1872) and Mary E. Braddon’s “the Shadow in the Corner” (1879) Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Lindsey Carman Williams
ABSTRACT British women’s supernatural tales written during the nineteenth century challenged the ideals of Victorian femininity and restrictive gendered roles such as wife and domestic servant. The female medium, through her power of communicating with spirits and establishing authority during séances, also transgressed femininity through her freely expressed behavior in front of sitters and skeptics
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“Meddling with Sorcery”: Hypnotism, the Occult and the Return of Forsaken Women in the 1890s Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Emma Liggins
Abstract Lettice Galbraith’s ghost stories are largely excluded from histories of the Victorian supernatural. Despite writing within a genre popular in the 1890s, little is known of her biography, her literary circle or her influences. Like other 1890s writers, Galbraith capitalised on public fascination with the tropes of crime narratives – the foggy London streets, the sensational newspaper snippets
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Ghostly Objects and the Horrors of Ghastly Ancestors in the Ghost Stories of Louisa Baldwin Women's Writing Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Ruth Heholt, Rebecca Lloyd
ABSTRACT This article examines the late Victorian ghost stories of Louisa Baldwin. Looking at several stories from her 1895 collection The Shadow on the Blind, we argue that, although her work is a part of the ongoing tradition of women’s ghost stories in the nineteenth century, they differ from most by the weight of emphasis given to family, ancestry, and the importance of material, inherited objects