'The celebrated Madame de Staël died at Paris.' - Hampshire Chronicle, Winchester (21 July 1817) Our woman writer of the month for June is Germaine de Staël, who with Jane Austen, is the subject of our main summer exhibition 'Fickle Fortunes', which runs [...]
Elizabeth Montagu: 'Queen of the Blues', patron of the arts, consummate hostess and generous philanthropist. The Montagus had an active social life, traveling around the country throughout the year to visit friends and stay at their various [...]
'It is more to my personal happiness and advantage to indulge the love and admiration of excellence, than to cherish a secret envy of it.' -Elizabeth Montagu Our woman writer of the month for May is Elizabeth Montagu, a [...]
Our second woman writer of the month is Elizabeth Blackwell, whose influential and beautifully illustrated A Curious Herbal is in the Chawton House Library collection. Elizabeth Blackwell, a 1737 lithograph by Villain. Elizabeth Blackwell (nee Blachrie), a [...]
As part of our #WomensWrites campaign in 2017, we will be featuring a different woman writer on our website each month. This is one of many ways we will be spreading the word about early women’s writing. ‘With this experience, [...]
Today is National Poetry Day. We remember Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), poet and novelist: 'the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic' as the editor of her verse, Stuart Curran, writes. Next week, scholars of [...]
Frances Burney (1752 –1840): described as ‘the Mother of English Fiction’ by Virginia Woolf in 1918.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689): England’s first major professional woman writer.