Glennis Stephenson

"The female novelist of the nineteenth century may have frequently encountered opposition and interference from the male literary establishment, but the female short story writer, working in a genre that was seen as less serious and less profitable, found her work to be actively encouraged." - from the Introduction. During the nineteenth century women writers finally began to be as popular—and as respected—as their male counterparts. We are all familiar with the novels of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and the Bröntes. Less familiar is the short fiction of the period; yet a great many nineteenth-century stories by women—both famous and obscure—retain in full measure their power to fascinate and to entertain. For this anthology Glennis Stephenson brings together stories by both British and North American writers; by such established luminaries as Shelley, Gaskell and Kate Chopin; and by lesser-known writers such as the Anglo-Indian writer Flora Steel, the Afro-American Alice Dunbar Nelson and the Canadian Annie Howells Frèchette. The result is an anthology that will be as interesting to the general reader as it will be useful to the student. Stephenson provides background information on all authors, together with a general introduction.

An Anthology

Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women

Glennis Byron

On 7 June 1838 Letitia Elizabeth Landon married George Maclean; on 5 July they sailed for Cape Coast; on 16 August they landed and one month later, Landon, at the age of thirty six, was found dead, slumped against her bedroom door with an empty bottle of prussic acid in her hand. This is the first full account of the literary career, life and death of the woman who achieved fame as the poetess L.E.L. Glennis Stephenson begins with an account of the rise of the poetess in the early nineteenth century, and then, drawing upon contemporary memoirs and reviews and upon many of Landon's own unpublished letters, moves on to her early life, and shows how Landon fit herself into this category of 'poetess' by constructing the persona of L.E.L. The book concludes with a discussion of Landon's sudden and mysterious death, and how various readings and misreadings offered by friends and acquaintances struggled to reconcile the dual persona of Woman and poetess. The life and works of this fascinating figure illuminate the conflicts, both personal and artistic, for women writers in the nineteenth century.

Glennis Stephenson

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