ME 's first short story to see print, The Little Red Umbrella, appeared in the New Statesman and Nation after being accepted by David Garnett .

The manuscript was rejected by Unwin and Heinemann before her friend John Lane accepted it for somewhat questionable reasons: It is always very pleasant to accept the MS of a new riter [sic] but it is a double pleasure when the book happens to be by a friend but when one adds by a women [sic] it baffles so poor a creature as a publisher to express adequate delight that I shall feel safe in leaving you to judge of my interest in your book. The volume appeared around the same time that FF began formal divorce proceedings against her estranged husband, prompting her to add a prefatory disclaimer: Owing to circumstances which have arisen since this story was written in the summer of 1893, it seems necessary to state that it is purely a work of the imagination, and that none of the characters or events are taken from real life.FF 's biographer Josephine Johnson , however, believes that the husband character in the novel is in fact modelled on Shaw , not Farr's ex-husband, which may suggest that this remark was provoked by a recent episode in their rather turbulent relationship. The novel, with a heroine named Grace Travers, may be responding to Shaw 's The Philanderer, whose similarly-named heroine, Grace Tranfield, was said to have been based on Farr (as another female role in that play was based on Farr's predecessor in Shaw's affections).

The Yellow Book (launched in April this year) accepted a poem by MF (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper ) for publication, but they decided the journal was too sensual, and withdrew their work.

MF at different times mentioned two different dates of composition for her first novel: either at the age of twenty-one, or during the three months after her marriage (June to September 1960, when she was twenty-two). She then either sent it to a publisher, who rejected it, or to an agent, who said it was not publishable but proposed discussing it. Not realising that the agent's suggestion constituted unusual encouragement, she was devastated, and switched at once to a lighter and less ambitious kind of novel.

She had floated the idea of writing a study of women in the seventeenth century in September 1979, and publishers George Weidenfeld and Bob Gottlieb both seem[ed] keen. She dedicated it to her mother, in Latin: For Lectissima Heroina [the most learned heroine] Elizabeth Longford .This book belonged to a powerful wave of exciting new historical investigation of the lives of women hidden from history. It was the fruit of research more wide-ranging and more self-directed than that for an individual biography, and it damaged a number of accepted stereotypes about women's historical silence and submissiveness.

KPF continued to write plays during the 1920s and 30s though theatrical agents always turned them down. She kept only those few manuscripts which she could not bear to burn. Titles include Darling Girl: a sporting farcical comedy, Scar: a modern melodrama, The Narcotic, An Equal Chance, and Broken by the Way. Some Stuff as Dreams was designed for young performers, and The Eagle's Lark (perhaps with the Women's Institute market in mind) for a small all-female cast. In 1927 she wrote two radio plays.

This was from the beginning a less purely private text than the Grasmere journal, being written, said DW , for the benefit of a few friends who were unable to come on the tour (foremost among them her sister-in-law Mary , who had just given birth). It was also not written at the time but later, not from notes but from memory. It was widely circulated in manuscript, and several of its readers argued that it ought to be printed. It survives in five copies: one made by Catherine Clarkson in 1805 from the original manuscript, another made by DW herself the following year (also from her original), two copies by Sara Hutchinson (one of them made for Coleridge ), and one made by DW with scribal help in 1822-3, for the purpose of submission to a publisher. For print, she omitted personal details (William's awkwardness with horse harness, her own resting stretched out on three chairs at an inn), embellished the original phrasing, and added some guide-book material. It was the poet Samuel Rogers who had opened negotiations to publish, but these fell through. William Wordsworth again considered publication years later, when he was already anxious about his sister's mental state, but he then decided that she might find seeing a book through the press a burden rather than a stimulus.

Winterson began writing the novel after she was turned down for a publishing job at Pandora Press , because the interviewing editor suggested she should write a book about her early life. Adam Mars-Jones has related that he declined for an anthology some pages of prose poetry which he suggests were related to the material that went into the novel.

The doctor, said Emily Coleman , often saved lives and refused money from those who could not afford to pay.AW , who was suicidal at the time, wrote: This is the first death I have completely realised. The poem was turned down by the New Statesman as too violent and emotional.

Mrs. Manstey's View had been accepted by Scribner's Magazine in May, with a warning that its subject-matter (the thoughts of an impoverished young woman whose chief spiritual sustenance is the view from her lodging-house window) was slighter than they really liked. The collection sold 3,500 copies in the USA and Britain.

Joseph Warton reported in January that Dodsley was grown surly peevish & avaricious to a degree—He swears he'll publish no more Novels—However, I have left the book [i.e. manuscript] with Him, & he is to consider farther of it. Nevertheless the novel was very well, & indeed pompously, printed indeed—in 4 very little Volumes—but looks quite handsome. It had a Dublin edition in 1783 and a second London edition in 1784, and was condensed and reprinted as a 146-page duodecimo in 1825 as The Affecting Story of Peggy and Patty; or, The Sisters of Ashdale. An Interesting Tale of Innocence Deceived. The running head of this reads Peggy and Patty Summers.

Shortly before giving birth to her first child, MAW ambitiously proposed to write for Macmillan a primer of English poetry. However, when she took some draft material to Macmillan general editor John Richard Green , a personal friend, he told her it wouldn't do and reassigned it to another writer. Instead of this MAW published, six weeks after Dorothy's birth, a broadsheet, Plain Facts about Infants' Food, which advised, among other things, against feeding on demand.

BBC Radio rejected the play when MW submitted it to them in 1977, but decided to broadcast it in 1981 after a producer saw the stage production. The National Theatre likewise initially rejected it, but then gave it a staged reading in April 1981. MW attributes her initial difficulties in getting the play produced to the fact that theatre at that time was still very riddled with gender-blindness. It reached print in Wandor's first volume of Plays by Women, 1982.

In about 1968 the recently-married JT composed her very first novel. Years later she said it had a pretentious title, The Desolate Market, and was really exclusively about myself, in the guise of a very young woman having an affair with an older man. She submitted it for the Femina Prize and got a polite, tactful rejection. When she found the manuscript again at about the turn of the century, during the process of moving house, she pushed it to the back of a drawer and re-abandoned it.

Heinemann published VT 's unusual biography of her husband, Alan Parsons ' Book, A Story in Anthology, which she had first offered to the Hogarth Press .

About the time of her memoir Three Houses, AT showed some friends and acquaintances a draft fiction entitled Three Sillies. E. V. Lucas told her she had distinct talent although the typescript in question was overlong, repetitive, poorly shaped. She submitted this work to James Hamilton (who had just entered the publishing business as Hamish Hamilton ) and was accepted in autumn 1932. Another of her mentors, W. Graham Robertson , wrote after this second book that he was jubilant in having rescued her from the OUP in which her first book was entombed.

Daviot wrote this play in 1936, and sent the script to John Gielgud , who liked [it] very much except for the last act, but this she was not willing to change. It was not produced for nearly ten years (being heard as a radio play in 1938). Daviot attributed the delay to the recent success of James Barrie 's final play, The Boy David, which closed in London in January 1937.

The Margaret Mitchell Estate and St Martin's Press rejected ET 's commissioned and completed second sequel to Gone With the Wind, writing off the $230,000 advance which they had already paid her.

During the correspondence course in writing which NS took more or less idly while she was mostly employed on the stage, she wrote three fairy stories which, although the course teachers said they were impossible to market and far too fantastic, were accepted by a children's magazine. Even so, when she turned to professional authorship she had no intention of becoming a children's writer.

From HS 's detailed Log Books, the scholar Jacqueline S. Bratton has managed to reconstruct much of her early years of journalism. Bratton says these typify relations between mid-century magazines and obscure writers. Between 1859 and 1866 HS was often among those solicited to compose a work in competition for a place in the Christmas number of All the Year Round, co-edited by Charles Dickens and William Henry Wills . Often making two submissions per year, HS was paid for nearly all whether they were published or not. One of her stories did appear in each of the 1859, 1864, 1865, and the 1866 editions. Bratton argues that HS 's compositions were from Dickens's point of view part of the heap of mediocre material which each year threatened to engulf his own efforts.

JS wrote the novel while staying with her aunt Dorothy Bussy 's family at Roquebrune in France, informally separated from her first husband, Stephen Tomlin . After finishing her manuscript, she sent it to the Hogarth Press , where it was promptly accepted for publication. Virginia Woolf judged it astonishingly good—complete and sharp and individual. Critic Hermione Lee argues that the text shows us what Virginia Woolf's tastes were in contemporary women's fiction. The novel was reprinted by Persephone Books in 2002, with a preface by Frances Partridge and a cover featuring a butterfly dress fabric from its year of publication, and at the same date it became available in audio cassette form, read by Miriam Margolyes .

It was only after her marriage and subsequent ectopic pregnancy that MS began seriously to consider writing novels. In 1948 she began work on a children's story, The Enchanted Journey, which was inspired by Walter de la Mare 's Henry Brocken. Stewart submitted the manuscript to a number of British publishers but they rejected it on the basis that it was too frightening for a children's tale.

Lâl, composed in Aberdeenshire, was rejected by several minor periodicals (to which Richard Gillies Hardy had suggested FAS should send it) but accepted at first sight by Mowbray Morris of Macmillan's Magazine (who supposed for three years that his promising new author was a man, and addressed letters to F. A. Steel Esq.). Morris was well qualified to appreciate FAS 's work, since Macmillan had recently become the publishers of Kipling .

Her brother tried in vain to find a London publisher for a third (manuscript) volume of her verse in August 1777.