HM depicts herself as both flummoxed and thrilled when her revered brother Thomas praised this essay highly without knowing of her authorship. When she revealed it, he counselled her: Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote yourself to this. She recalled: That evening made me an authoress. She also in her Autobiography linked her vocation to her single status and a sense of unfitness for domestic life: The older I have grown, the more serious and irremediable have seemed to me the evils and disadvantages of married life, as it exists among us at this time. . . . My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. . . . The simplicity and independence of this vocation first suited my infirm and ill-developed nature, and then sufficed for my needs, together with family ties and domestic duties, such as I have been blessed with, and as every woman's heart requires.

View reference

Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Virago, 1983, 2 vols.

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The book was better received among North American transcendentalists and Unitarians than it was in Britain. The Atlantic Monthly gave it a lengthy review in 1859, commenting to the shame of our virile secus be it said, a woman has written the best popular treatise on Ethics in the language.

SGused to tell serial stories some time before she had learnt to write them.At eleven she wrote a song, both words and music, and sent it to a publisher, but it was rejected.When her mother learned this story, she delivered a lecture insisting that ladies only work for charity.SG went on composing songs, however, as well as beginning to write stories, which she also submitted for publication and which were also rejected.She kept her early writing in a notebook, and by the late nineteenth century she had acquired a large collection of these little volumes.

Critic Susan J. Wolfson argues, from a careful reading of the collection's title piece, that Felicia Browne's precocious genius has ensured that what she intended as a paean on domestic affection ends up exposing a socially specific scheme so inwrought with suppression and denial for women as to evoke a longing for death as their only release.Tricia Lootens finds in War and Peace: A Poem an ideological reversal or collapse that turns the givens of military glory on their heads. This she considers paradigmatic for FH 's patriotic poetry, a vital, fragmented, and self-subversive catalog of feminine patriotic subject positions—a body of work whose development often seems more centrifugal than linear and whose force seems to derive from its erratic course among and through contradictions.

James Martineau , however, writing in the Westminster Review, praised the work of the lady-translator but decried her decision to translate an atheist, and one of quite secondary philosophical repute.

Domestic Manners, remains FT 's best-known work. Her biting indictment of American life caused an immediate sensation, selling exceedingly well in both England and America. She was, and continues to be, both denounced for her snobbery and praised for her honesty. Critic Helen Heineman claims that FT 's remarks on the affected delicacy of American ladies were considered the most dangerous part of her book. Indeed, reviewers from both countries were primarily critical of her discussions of American women's religious practices and manners. The New Monthly Magazine reviewer—no doubt responding to the sexual suggestiveness of FT 's descriptions of young women caught in religious raptures—charged her with exaggeration, and found Mrs. Trollope's facts . . . exceedingly suspicious; her comments absolutely indecent and revolting. . . . [S]he gives way to a pert, coarse, and prurient style of innuendo and description, which is as inconsistent with delicacy as it is with fairness and candour.In response to FT 's description of a young woman at a revival yelling Woe! woe to the backsliders! hear it, hear it, Jesus! when I was 15 my mother died, and I backslided, oh Jesus, I backslided!, the Athenæum attacked her with a response of Oh Mrs. Trollope! Mrs. Trollope! we hope when this was going on that you remembered you were an old woman.The New Monthly Magazine also criticized her for questioning the prudish behaviour expected of American women, calling the texture of [FT 's] mind . . . essentially gross. There are stories in her book which offend modesty, and in her spite against prudery she indulges in something far less to be endured.FT was called unladylike and amazonian in the common rhetoric for a woman who had overstepped her feminine limits.

When it first appeared, RHD 's story met with wide critical acclaim and broad recognition from members of the American literary community.Emily Dickinson wrote to her sister-in-law for a copy. Davis's publisher, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, James T. Fields , encouraged her to submit more short stories, and she won the attention of the Transcendentalist circle surrounding Fields, which included Louisa May Alcott , Nathaniel Hawthorne , Oliver Wendell Holmes , and Ralph Waldo Emerson . This story was an important influence on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps , who wrote of it: One could never say again that one did not understand.

Her Times obituary says that those who knew her thought GP very modest about her writing. She almost never mentioned it, having an almost fanatical dislike of self-advertisement.

A response from Tennyson to this early work found promise in the young poet. Though he did identify some flaws, he explained that if the book were not so good I should not care for these specks, but the critics will pounce upon them, and excite a prejudice. I declare that I should like to know her.

Appreciation of EG 's work has increased considerably since the advent of feminist literary criticism and the growing interest in the cross-fertilizations of literature and politics.

A reader named Rod Lake responded through the columns of Oz with an offer of his personal services to prove her mistaken about Englishmen's quota of sex-appeal.

The Monthly Review praised her achievement: she had traced events to their origins, and produced accurate rather than flattering portraits of historical figures. Her occasional warmth was warranted by the importance of her subject-matter. The Critical Review notice opened with a retrospective of this majestic work of history, going back almost twenty years. Its tone was celebratory. CM , it said, never fails to support her criticism of royalist positions with a force of observation which justly entitles her to the applause that is due to ingenuity—that is, to intellect. It noted both her inviolable love of constitutional liberty and her denial that she was a republican. Its final bouquet of praise is gendered: her work is one of the most signal instances ever known to the literary world, of the extraordinary abilities and persevering exertion of a female writer. The Westminster Magazine reprinted an anecdote from this volume.

William Enfield quoted eight lines from Aikin (as Our Poetess) in dedicating his very popular anthology The Speaker, designed for the teaching of elocution, to the head of Warrington Academy . Her volume led Anna Seward to include her among the seven living celebrated Female Poets whom Seward celebrated in the Gentleman's Magazine in April 1789. It seems on balance that Ode to Spring must be the poem which William Wordsworth later called the first from which he remembered to have received great pleasure—but since he wrongly named Elizabeth Carter (who wrote no poem on spring) as its author, the identification is less than certain.Roger Lonsdale and William McCarthy agree that nothing like the blank verse of Corsica had been written in English by a woman before; McCarthy discerns a strong flavour of Thomson .

Robert Buchanan in the Athenæum speculated that the author was a woman, and called the poem a rhythmical paraphrase of the prose popularized by the Times Correspondents.He detected the influence of Robert Browning and Owen Meredith . Buchanan launched a persistent theme in Braddon criticism in leading off with the observation, M. E. Braddon writes so well that we regret she has not taken pains to write better, and concluding: By studying better models and choosing better subjects, she may make a reputation; for she possesses character, passion, and (we may add) originality.

SD began writing after reading an injunction from Doris Lessing about putting one's life in order. Some fringe plays that she attended were absolutely dreadful, which made her confident that she could do better. She worked on her first script for eighteen months and sent it to the Royal Court Theatre in October 1978, having read in Time Out that they would reply to all submissions. The play was rejected on the grounds that it hovers on the edge of melodrama and the tone blurs into the sensational, but the theatre's reader, director John Burgess , praised the vigour of the dialogue. Not many people are writing like this for women—casual, angry talk, shrewd, bitter, violent, witty, etc. This very complimentary report gave SD the confidence to try again. She admitted later that the report's criticism was apt. The Royal Court Theatre accepted and staged the second play that she submitted to them.

Early didactic writing for children has had a very bad press ever since the rise of fantasy in Victorian times. Nevertheless there is something extreme and gratuitous in Geoffrey Summerfield 's verdict in 1985 that Original Stories might be considered the most sinister, ugly, overbearing book for children ever published. At the time Jabez Hirons , writing in the Monthly Review and correctly guessing the author's identity, praised the work as an agreeable and useful addition to Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.

In This Our World was favourably reviewed by CPG 's contemporaries, who read it as heralding the emergence of a passionate and vigorous female voice. Gary Scharnhorst , her primary biographer, finds this reception surprising in light of CPG 's increasingly irregular scansion and informal style of verse.

Later editions increase the number of prefatory tributes. The sixth (a handsome publication with a two-colour title page) places first a poem of compliment by the young James Sterling . Sterling presents EH as a reformer, third in a Triumvirate of Wit with Behn and Manley . He comments, too, on the brutal Force of envious Men.

Several commentators picked up the idea of influence by Jane Eyre. H. F. Chorley in the Athenæum praised the work as JK 's best to date, for a sentiment, a tenderness, an old-world French grace . . . which are individual as they are elegant. He also discerned Brontë's traces: we cannot but think that Nathalie would hardly have been born had not Currer Bell's daughter been her ancestress. Recent scholars have agreed. Shirley Foster notes that there are many recognizable Bronteian elements . . . and we may speculate that Julia Kavanagh seized on patterns in the earlier novel which coincided with her own particular wish-fulfillment.

Rumbold has remarked that JCM is not assertive enough for a satirist: that her poem on Philips lacks force.

Its frequent copying and reprinting suggest that its virtuous sentiments were popular, and probably taken unironically.

The bishop of Clonfurt, to whom her father sent the volume before publication, admired her talents but issued a reminder of the dangers of female vanity.

Other reviews were more complimentary. The Spectator judged both Not Wisely, but Too Well and Cometh Up as a Flower to be no more immoral than Jane Eyre, and said that they represented the desire to be loved to madness as an exercise of power.Anthony Trollope wrote to RB from Washington in 1868 in response to the accusation of immorality: In the story I have read there is not a word I would not have had written by my sister or my daughter—if I had one. I do not understand the critics who, when there is so much that is foul abroad, can settle down with claws and beaks on a tale which teaches a wholesome lesson without an impure picture or faulty expression.

View reference

Sadleir, Michael. Things Past. Constable, 1944.

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Later, in An Autobiography, Trollope praised both RB and Anne Thackeray Ritchie , describing the work of both as feminine. He noted approvingly the energy of Broughton's writing, even though her heroines tended to do and say things which ladies would not do and say. They throw themselves at men's heads, and when they are not accepted only think how they may throw themselves again.

On its publication, after her death, FB 's diary became popular while she was almost forgotten as a novelist, let alone a playwright. For years she was valued chiefly as a reporter of the social and historical scene; attention is now being turned to her artistry in life-writing as well as in fiction and drama.