Cosmopolitan magazine rejected the novel despite its long-term commitment to publishing ER 's work.

Robert Graves helped persuade Leonard and Virginia Woolf to publish it.

She apparently began to write for a readership after giving up the aim of a musical career, by producing contributions for an unnamed friend's manuscript magazine. Her first attempt was Christmas in Australia, an essay in the humourist style of Charles Lamb . She moved beyond this journal's comfort zone with a critique of Ibsen 's highly controversial The Master Builder and a proposed serial translation of J. P. Jacobsen 's Danish Niels Lyhne. At this point her fiancé intervened, advising that her translation (done from an interim German version of the Danish) was worthy of a better outlet, and suggesting mainstream publication. She found that sitting alone in a room of her own and writing gave her intense pleasure. Her English version of Niels Lyhne (entitled Siren Voices) was offered to Heinemann in 1894, accepted with a payment of forty pounds, and published by them, with her The Fisher Lass (from Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 's Norwegian Fiskerjenten), in 1896. She developed a deeply-felt admiration for Jacobsen and tried to render every nuance of his style. She used her real name on these translations: Ethel F. L. Robertson.

FR showed a draft of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty, &c to Samuel Johnson : he pressed her to publish it, but to revise it first.

When she was twenty or twenty-one, AQ wrote a novel called A Slice of Moon. For eighteen months or more, she worked the hardest at writing, more disciplined than I have ever done since. She put it aside after it was rejected by two publishers.

At least six publishers rejected it before Warne accepted.BP achieved her greatest literary creativity in the face of parental disapproval. The Tale of Peter Rabbit was no sooner published than she experienced painful unpleasantness at home . . . about the work.

JP had begun writing some years before this first publication. During the 1930s she produced nine long novels, in which she tried to emulate her literary heroes (theBrontësEmily Brontë , George Eliot , Dickens , Victor Hugo , and Tolstoy ,) in serious, psychological studies of contemporary life. These, however were all rejected by the publishers to whom she sent them. In 1991 she remembered these early novels as being over-idealistic: Oh, you know what you are when you're young. You're putting the world right, aren't you? And nobody wants to read them.

The Yellow Wall-Paper, a story by Charlotte Stetson (the future CPG ) appeared in the New England Magazine, after being rejected as too distressing by the Atlantic Monthly.

Her novel was rejected by Simon and Schuster , but accepted by Gollancz. It was published, unfortunately, during her complete mental breakdown, the most serious she ever had.

Through his connections, Benson Hill had the play presented to Covent Garden Theatre . Though the management chose not to produce the play, they provided IH with a long letter full of encouragement and constructive criticism. IH dedicated it To Benson Earle Hill, In gratitude for his zeal and perseverance in behalf of this attempt, which the praise of others could never exalt in his opinion, nor their censure reduce, it is inscribed; to join the names of those who have through life united their hearts; by his sister, the author.

She took four years to write this novel, working with a new agent, A. D. Peters . Having before this written fast and easily, she now reduced her speed to a crawl, with constant rewriting. Her idea for telling her story in reverse did not go down well. When she showed the manuscript, three-quarters finished, to Robert Linscott and then Robert Haas on another New York visit, they said they could not publish it. Her agent, A. D. Peters , also disliked the structure, but later came round. She dedicated the finished work to Robert Linscott . John Bayley wrote an introduction in 1986 which re-appeared in an edition of 1994.

The book was edited by Deborah G. Plant and included a foreword by Alice Walker . In Britain it was titled Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave. Kossula, then aged nineteen, lived through the massacre of most of his people by an enemy tribe. He was then sold and shipped from West Africa to the USA on the Clotilda, the last ship that illegally transported African captives, fifty years after the slave trade had supposedly been suppressed. He then became one of the longest-lived of that human cargo. Hurston sought him out and coaxed him to talk and to reminisce. But when she submitted her work to Viking Press they said they wanted it in language rather than dialect. Hurston declined to sanitize the manuscript in this way, which is why it spent so long in the Howard University archives before reaching print.

It was, she said, an adaptation from a play by H. V. Esmond entitled Birds of a Feather, whose chief role was an old Jew, grand, petty, noble, and inglorious, generous and impossibly mean—but really a great character.NJ herself had fancied acting the role of Jacob Ussher's sister, in the novel Grace Ussher. She showed her finished manuscript to Eva Moore (widow of H. V. Esmond and herself an actress), who was not much impressed. But the agent Raymond Savage , working for Curtis Brown , took it on and placed it with Thornton Butterworth . Savage became NJ 's personal friend.

The Royal Court produced AJ 's The Rising Generation, a young people's play which had previously been rejected by the British Girl Guides Association .

JJ 's first book to reach print was a novel entitled The Captains and the Kings. It was actually the second work for which she had sought publication.

PJ published In the Shadows, a canoeingpoem, in The Week after it had been rejected by her mother's cousin William Dean Howells , then editor at Harper's.

Jessie Chambers , DHL 's friend from youth, submitted a number of Lawrence's poems to Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), who published them in the English Review.

Before Babies in Rhinestones appeared, SM completed a novel entitled A Bowl of Cherries, which reuses some parts of her unpublished The Firefly Motel. She submitted this, her first novel for over a decade, to Jonathan Cape (with whom she had a contract), and had it rejected. This caused her a crisis in confidence, through which she was helped by literary networking: first Brigid Brophy , then Iris Murdoch , read the novel in manuscript. In 1982 Murdoch recommended SM to try the Harvester Press , which was at that date a much less mainstream publisher than Cape.

As O. M. Manning she drafted and sent out for consideration two novels whose manuscripts she later burned, against the wishes of her husband .

May Sinclair helped to introduce CM 's work to Ezra Pound , who received it enthusiastically and helped to get it published here. The Egoist unfortunately did not pay. Pound also recommended that CM should send her poems to Poetry magazine in Chicago (which, however, turned them down).

Mitchell Kennerley had offered Millay $150 in cash for the (still hypothetical) manuscript of her second book. She submitted it, and in March 1920 was expecting its appearance, but nothing happened. By June, with Kennerley not answering her letters, she was considering other publishers, and settled for F. Shay .

The first novel which IM offered to a publisher was read by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber ; he rejected it, perhaps on grounds of the wartime paper shortage.

Among EN 's poems written at eleven is a sonnet, elegant if conventional, to her sister Mary, promising to love thee with a love that cannot die. Other, lighter pieces of this period recall the poetic voice of her fictional Noel Bastable. All her early poetry employs a male voice. From her late teens she submitted poetry to magazines and dreamed of being a great poet.

On coming down from Oxford in 1965, AO submitted to the Manchester Guardian an essay entitled On the Disadvantages of an Oxford Education. They rejected it.