She had sent The Squirrel, the Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit unsuccessfully to several publishers before Heinemann . It became a book of 111 pages, with 29 colour illustrations. AU recommended Dorothy Hutton as illustrator, but Heinemann chose Margaret Tempest , who (for this book and the next three Uttley books she illustrated) received fifteen pounds for her copyright, while AU was paid only ten for hers. Perhaps for this reason, as well as for reasons of incompatibility, Uttley was for years annoyed by Tempest's claims to joint authorship in the series.

SS felt she had enough poems to offer (with the sharply quirky drawings in which her style was already distinctive) to a publisher.

Accounts vary as to how EW 's first serious publications came about. One is that in 1936 she showed three stories to Reggie Tupper , a friend with an appreciation for literature. He encouraged her to send the stories to the best periodicals at the time. EW gave a different account: that she tried her hand at writing a few stories which she secretly sent out to publish without telling anyone. She said, I had no standard of measuring whether it was impertinent to expect to be printed, and I didn't like to ask anyone. The third account says that EW was encouraged to publish by Sylvia Lynd , a literary friend of her half-aunt Margaret Bryant . All three accounts reinforce the amateur image EW had of herself as a writer.

It went through so many drafts over the next fourteen years, often in response to developments in her life or her circle, or to suggestions by friends who read it in manuscript, that the novel as eventually published bears little resemblance to the earliest versions. Pym's revisions and re-revisions have been read as offering a diagram of her emotional as well as her literary development over these years. Of the many different potential titles that BP worked at over the years between 1934 and 1941, this was the only one to be published. Yet work done during these years later went into many of her posthumously-published books.

She withdrew this novel after her agent, A. P. Watt , was unable to place it in six months.

As a late-teenage girl at home who had longed vainly for university, ES managed to get some short stories accepted by unimportant magazines. This taste of success led to more ambitious attempts, and so to a growing pile of rejected MSS. on my shelf, labelled Mount of Humiliations.

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.

Having published stories while still at Barnard , PH continued once she was in employment. Home and Food published her Uncertain Treasure (later reprinted as Mountain Treasure) in August 1943. Another story at this time was turned down by the New Yorker for being too sordid.

As an undergraduate at Reading University , already a seasoned professional journalist, EH tried to supplement her meagre finances by producing short stories and reportage, but they did not sell. She continued to write unpaid, and gained useful experience. At Cornell she went on publishing in Tamesis (the Reading University magazine), while also producing articles for the Cornell campus newspaper.

A newspaper rejected this piece, but Thoby Stephen felt it showed that Virginia might be a bit of a genius.

Her first publication arose out of her hunger for magazines to read. She submitted essays under the name of Eloine to the New York Mercury, hoping by this means to secure a subscription to the magazine. The New York Mercury at first printed her contributions without sending her anything in return, but a stern reproof to the editor by letter produced a large batch of back numbers. She began submitting poetry under the same name, her first piece being an ambitious description of a highly emotional experience. The editor printed these with a half-column of sarcastic ridicule, and the remark that since she wrote acceptably in prose she ought never again to attempt poetical expression. Humiliated but undeterred, Ella Wheeler soon afterwards published her first verse under her own name in the Waverly Magazine, and began submitting systematically to a long list of other periodicals, stubbornly ignoring her rejection slips and revelling in her acceptances.

DW must have been writing and publishing stories before her first novel appeared, since she was working on High Wages when her Miss Boddy was printed in Everyman and she recorded it as her first piece to be accepted for five years—too long. A few years later she engaged an agent, Curtis Brown , and recorded with amazement (thrown quite off my balance) their placing her Miss Pratt Disappears in both Argosy (with first serial rights) and Story-teller (with second serial rights), bringing her fifty guineas in all.Poor Miss Simpson brought twenty guineas. A propos another piece, Cora, she recorded that she could never judge an idea for a story without writing it out to see if it worked. This made her call herself a bad workman, half-hearted at her desk though enthusiastic when thinking idly in bed. She was particularly glad to place A Lovely Time in the Adelphi because Katherine Mansfield had published there, and overjoyed at being asked to write an essay on Women are too Humble for Modern Weekly in company with Naomi Mitchison , Vera Brittain , and Winifred Holtby .

As an advertising copywriter, FW was associated with famous slogans like Go to work on an egg (not personally created by her, but by her team) and Unzip a banana! She reports that she failed to persuade Smirnoff to adopt the slogan Vodka makes you drunker quicker.

As a child Betty Coles (later ET ) wrote plays (with very short scenes each demanding a new and elaborate setting) and stories. She said she always wanted to be a novelist. At twelve she had a poem rejected for print as being nice but a trifle stormy. Not only drafting novels and keeping a diary while still at school, she had even begun already to send out stories to editors and novels to publishers, without success. After leaving school, both before and after her marriage, she devoted her major energies to the struggle to write. At the end of 1938 she began three novels, but soon abandoned them all, as she did another begun early the next year. At this date the novelists she admired and identified with were the politically committed: Naomi Mitchison , Winifred Holtby , and Sylvia Townsend Warner . She later destroyed everything she had written before 1943, and by that time she had excised the political element from her work. Those standing behind her, she now said, were Jane Austen , Chekhov , E. M. Forster , Virginia Woolf , and Turgenev .

She was working on a farce again in December 1779, and a year after that she submitted another one, on the topic of polygamy, to Harris , who rejected it. Yet another farce, The Ancient Law, she submitted to a different manager, Colman , with the same effect. In 1781 Colman actually kept a comedy she sent him; but he never put it on stage.

One of the pieces in this volume, Cornborough Vicarage was said in the Feminist Companion to have been serialized in Good Words, but Stamp thinks it unlikely that any of the volume's contents had appeared previously in periodicals. She speculates that ML may have sent her manuscript to Smith, Elder as the publishers of Gaskell 's successful Whitby novel, Sylvia's Lovers. They offered to begin payment to her after the sale of 1,000 copies, which was expecting an unrealistically high sales performance. ML dedicated this first book to M.A.H.—which causes Stamp to doubt the story that John Lupton offered financial help with its production. The Tales had a new edition in 1893. After its publication ML experienced repeated rejection of her work, which was a factor in her depression in the years following her father's death.

From the age of eleven Catherine McMullen (later CC ) scribbled poems, stories, and plays. She called her first serious story The Wild Irish Girl—although if the title of Sydney Morgan 's novel had reached her at all, it probably did so as a non-literary, isolated piece of folk language. She submitted On the Second Floor, a story of 16,000 words, to the local newspaper: she had paid half a crown to have it copied out by a friend with beautiful handwriting, since she could not afford a typist. It was rejected with contempt, obviously unread.

Between her first and her second novel, ZF wrote a feminist updating of the myth of Iphigenia, only to have it rejected by Macmillan . She was deeply upset by this, and not consoled when assured by her editor that it was because he had such faith in [her] future that he would not do her the disservice of publishing a book that was so melodramatic and whose male characters were such cardboard cutout stage villains. Macmillan further suggested that if another publisher accepted it, that would be cunning and unscrupulous. Fairbairns believed it was her discussions of sex inequality that were unacceptable, and identified with Sylvia Plath as someone experiencing apparent recognition as a young writer which turns out to be a joke at your expense. She felt Macmillan were hypocritical in pushing her as about to become an established woman novelist and then rejecting her unpublished A Publicity Stunt and Thank You for Having Me as well as Tales I Tell My Mother (which was then published by Journeyman ). As a young writer, she says, she had no notion that an author might be stolen from one publisher by another, but looking back twenty years later she realised that publishers don't want the embarrassment of being proved wrong by seeing a book succeed which they have themselves rejected. She felt that Iphigenia and her other unpublished novels lacked good editing, but were in themselves better work than either Live as Family or Down. She was left feeling that a monstrous trick had been played on her, whereby she was told both that she was a successful novelist and at the same time that she was no longer of interest.

At eight years old PF won a bronze medal for a Nature Note submitted to the magazine Little Folks. She had invented the observation she recorded, of a mother rabbit carrying her babies to safety ahead of the harvesters. She felt no guilt but only delight at winning by means of a lie. She wanted to be a poet, but found she had no music in me. Before she turned sixteen she had drafted several novels. The two she wrote at home in the year after leaving school (writing in the family drawing-room while talk went on around her) were actually submitted to publishers, but rejected. Another she abandoned. Her father taught her to be industrious, though she never emulated his regular work habits.

She worked in spring 1945 on two stories about the WAC (one about a close friendship between two women and one about a middle-aged Wac being mocked by male officers). Both were rejected for publication.

During these five days MS submitted four poems and a parody verse-play to various publications: every one was returned.

She wrote the stories with Ford's encouragement, and he sent them to an agent in London. He also recommended her work to publisher's reader Edward Garnett , and wrote a lengthy introduction to the book.

MRM wrote her first attempt, Fiesco, in early 1821, inspired (like Hannah Cowley ) by seeing a mediocre tragedy which she felt she could outdo. Rejected by Macready , it survives only in passages published in the Museum.

From before the time her parents separated, EB was writing poems and stories. When her father left them, her writing became immensely important and consoling to her, and she began to dream of publication. She achieved this about a year later, when Arthur Mee printed a poem she had submitted to a children's-magazine poetry competition. After this she submitted over a hundred pieces for publication only to have them rejected. Only once at this time did she have a poem (untraced and presumably pseudonymous) published in Nash's Magazine. Meanwhile, however, she contributed the stories to a magazine which she ran with her two closest friends at school, which they called Dab from the first letters of its editorial team's surnames. Mabel Attenborough , the much older sister of one of these friends, encouraged EB (as her mother emphatically did not) in her persistent quest for publication. Enid also kept a diary, but she pared it to the bone after she discovered that her mother had read some of what she had written. It seems that her second husband protectively destroyed most of it late in both their lives.