Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere)’s Reviews > A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing > Status Update

Annie French Hector: "Journalist, novelist. ....married in 1858, had four children. Published 41 novels after the death of her husband in 1875." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Fr...

Another example of little known author, and short bio: "Emma Robinson (1814-1890): Novelist. Born in London, daughter of a bookseller. Remained single. Went mad. First novel, Richelieu in Love (1844)." - and not in wikipedia. Book is here:http://archive.org/details/richelieui...

There are a lot of women authors with really little biographical information in this period. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroness...

Thanks to notes like this in the Biographical Appendix - under Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, last sentence: "Died under mysterious circumstances." - Am having to look up every other entry because I must know more than that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laetitia...

"There is a female voice that has rarely spoken for itself in the English novel - the voice of the shopgirl and the charwoman, the housewife and the barmaid. One possible effect of the [1970s era] women's movement might be the broadening of the class base from which women novelists have come."

"[Doris] Lessing herself will have to face the limits of her own fiction very soon, if civilization survives the 1970s, which she has predicted it will not." - surprise non-apocalypse!

"It is as natural for a character in a [Margaret] Drabble novel to gossip about nineteenth-century heroines as to discuss her own childhood; in fact, more so. Heroines rather reticent about their own sexuality will decided that "Emma got what she deserved in marrying Mr. Knightley. What can it have been like, in bed with Mr. Knightley?""

On Woolf: "...in wishing to make women independent of all that dailiness and bitterness, so that they might "escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality," she was advocating a strategic retreat, and not a victory; a denial of feeling, and not a mastery of it."

"I think it is important to demystify the legend of Virginia Woolf. To borrow her own murderous imagery, a woman writer must kill the Angel in the House, that phantom of female perfection who stands in the way of freedom. For Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, the Angel was Jane Austen. For the feminist novelists, it was George Eliot. For mid-twentieth-century novelists, the Angel is Woolf herself."