19th Century Writers, Slides of English Literature

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Fanny Burney (1752-

• (^) NOVELS : First novel, Evelina, published anonymously in 1778;

Cecilia (1782); Camilla (1796); The

Wanderer (1814).

• (^) The first three novels are all about a young, beautiful, inexperienced girl.
• (^) The poshumous publication of her journals and letters has revealed her as an 18thc observer and writer of character sketches.
• (^) Married Alexandre D’Arblay in
  1. Her son, Alexandre, was born in 1794.
• (^) Suffered a mastectomy without anaesthetic for suspected breast cancer.
• (^) Survived her husband, father and son.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-

• (^) NOVELS: Mary, A Fiction (1788).
• (^) Her most important work has been A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), where she argued that what appeared to be the nature of woman was actually a consequence of her education, imposed on her by man. She regarded marriage as legalized prostitution.
• (^) Married the prominent atheist and anarchist philosopher William Godwin and died 10 days after the birth of her daughter, Mary.

Mary Hays (1760-1843)

• (^) NOVELS: Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796); The Victim of Prejudice (1799); The Brothers; or Consequences (1815); Family Annals; or the Sisters (1817).
• (^) Her first love died before the wedding, which led her to intellectual pursuits (reading, writing, and corresponding with religious and political reformers).
• (^) Exposed to the teachings of the leading Rational Dissenters of the period.
• (^) Moved to London under the influence of the Jacobin intellectuals. Strongly influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft (Emma Courtney), which led her to produce some feminist work.
• (^) The anti-feminist backlash of the turn of the century seems to have conditioned her later work. The Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Maria Edgeworth (1767-

• (^) NOVELS: Castle Rackrent (1800); Belinda (1801); Ennui (1809); Patronage ( vol. Novel; 1814).
• (^) Generally considered writer of the first regional novel in Engliah.
• (^) Resided most of her life in Ireland, managing her father’s state. Her father encouraged her writing.
• (^) Committed herself to the cause of the Irish peasants during the Potato Famine (1845-9).

Amelia Opie (1769-

• (^) NOVELS: Father and Daughter (1801);

Adeline Mowbray (1805).

• (^) Her mother died when she was only 15 and she had to manage her father’s household.
• (^) Her novels often emphasize the importance of individual morality as a religious and social duty, rather than as part of a political system.
• (^) She was a prolific poet too.
• (^) She married the painter John Opie, divorced from his first wife, though he died in 1807. She turned to writing.
• (^) Active anti-slavery campaigner. She donated much of her time to charity.

Mary Brunton (1778-

• (^) NOVELS: Self-Control

(1811); Discipline (1814).

• Limited early education.
• Fell in love with

Reverend Alexander

Brunton, a churh of

Scotland miknister, later

professor of Oriental

Languages in the Univ.

Of Edinburgh. It was a

happy marriage.

• She got pregnant after

20 years of marriage and

died in childbirth.

Mary Russell Mitford (1787-

• (^) NOVELS: Belford Regis (1835).
• (^) A precocious child who could read before she was three.
• (^) Wrote poets, plays, and prose.
• Our Village (1824, 1826, 1828, 1830, 1832), her sketches of rural life, had enormous success.
• (^) She was devoted to her father, and contributed to support him by writing prose.

Harriet Martineau (1802-

• (^) NOVELS: Deerbrook (1839); The Hour and the Man (1840); Life in the Sickroom (1844); Playfellow (1841).
• (^) Unitarian manufacturing family.
• (^) At her father’s death, Harriet had to earn her living and help support her mother and sisters.
• (^) Moved to London and made friends with George Eliot, Florence Nightingale and Charlotte Brontë, to name but a few.
• (^) Paid a visit to the States and expressed her support for the Abolitionist party.
• (^) Knew Darwin and was familiar with his work even before publication.

Mrs Henry Wood (1814-

• (^) NOVELS: Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles

(1862); Danesbury House (1860);

East Lynne (1861); Verner’s Pride

(1863); The Shadow of Ashlydyat

(1863); St Martin’s Eve (1866).

• (^) Born into a manufacturing family. Her ill health plagued her life.
• (^) Married Henry Wood and had 5 children, of which 4 survived.
• (^) In the 1850s the family business collapsed. Ellen then had to support the family and turned to writing.
• East Lynne became one of the biggest sellers in British literary history, as well as a huge theatrical hit. It is a tale of adultery, desertion and divorce centred around the tragic Lady Isabel Vane.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-

• (^) NOVELS: Jane Eyre (1847); Shirley

(1849); Villette (1853); The

Professor (1857).

• (^) Mother died in 1821. Two elder sisters also died in 1814 and 1815.
• (^) With Branwell, they wrote stories about a fictitious country, Angria.
• (^) Educated at Clergy Daughters’ School (Lancashire) and Roe Head (Mirfield), where she met her lifelong friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. She returned to Roe Head as a teacher.
• (^) In 1839 she took up a position as governess. In 1842 she travelled to Brussels where she returned in 1843 to take up a teaching post at the pensionate.
• (^) Finally returned to Haworth in
• (^) Married Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died during her first pregnancy.

Emily Brontë (1818-

• (^) NOVELS: Wuthering

Heights (1847).

• (^) Younger sister of Charlotte.

With Anne, they wrote

stories about a fictitious

country, Gondal.

• (^) Commenced work as a

governess at Miss

Patchett’s Ladies Academy

(Halifax) and later

attended a private school

at Brussels.

• (^) Spent the rest of her life

at Haworth, where she died

of tuberculosis.

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-

• (^) NOVELS: Mary Barton (1848);

Cranford (1851-3); Ruth (1853);

North and South (1854-5); Sylvia’s

Lovers (1863); Cousin Phillis

(1864); Wives and Daughters

• (^) Born Elizabeth Stevenson, her

father being a unitarian minister.

• (^) In 1832 she married William

Gaskell, the minister at Cross

Street Unitarian Chapel in

Manchester and had a prolific

family of five surviving children.

• (^) The industrial surroundings of

Manchester offered the inspiration

for her novels. She also wrote

gothic stories, a contrast to her

industrial fiction.

• (^) She wrote the first biography of

Charlotte Brontë.

George Eliot (1819-

• (^) NOVELS: Adam Bede (1959; The Mill on the Floss (1860); Silas Marner (1861); Romola (1863); Felix Holt, the Radical (1866); Middlemarch (1871-2); Daniel Deronda (1876).
• (^) George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Anne Evans. She was brought up within a narrow low church Anglican family.
• (^) Her Marmalade Brompton cake became the most popular cake in England then.
• (^) The family move to Coventry exposed her to new influences in religious and political thought.
• (^) She moved to London and became assistant editor of the Westminster Review in 1851. She was a scandalous figure of female professional development and autonomy for the time.
• (^) She met the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes in 1851 and they moved together in 1854. Lewes was already married. They shunned and were shunned by Victorian society at the time.