CS persevered with writing plays, and began studying drama and theatre history. One of her early plays, also performed at the Birmingham School of Art , starred her sister . Another centred on an actress unjustly seen as scandalous, who works incognita as a governess. Another, the one-act Mrs Jordan, was given a skilled amateur production in Birmingham. The great eighteenth-century actress Dorothy Jordan was a heroine to CS , because of her breeches roles and her bold and skilful navigation of scandal over her royal lover. Later Smedley sent Mrs Jordan to Mrs Patrick Campbell , who put it on at the Royalty Theatre (where it ran for six months as a curtain-raiser to Hermann Sudermann 's Magda). Mrs Campbell played the starring role, after trouble with the censor over its allusions to a member of the royal family behaving badly. Another play by CS , Kitty, had a provincial tour and was later invited to tour South Africa, but by that time the manuscript had been lost. In her early twenties CS was furiously writing plays for such prominent performers as Mrs Patrick Campbell and Violet Vanbrugh , but was still young enough to take it hard when the perpetual change of plans left my plays, so enthusiastically accepted, unproduced.

During a break in her MA thesis-writing, in the early 1970s, CS experimented with a kind of a literary whodunnit.She sent it to several publishers (Oberon , Macmillan , and McClelland and Stewart ), and all rejected it, but with encouragement for the future.

NS succeeded in publishing her book The Living Mountain: a Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, which she had written, submitted, and had rejected in the 1940s.

She said she wanted to puncture the prevailing mood of adulation, but chose anonymity so as not to pain Johnson's step-daughter Lucy Porter . The following year she supplied materials to Boswell for his biography, which she intended to display Johnson's real character in its strange mixture of good and bad; but Boswell afterwards rejected and destroyed her contributions.

By March 1882 she was making the rounds of publishing houses in London, having moved to England in 1881. During these first years in England, OS —often ill, very lonely, and ashamed of her failure to make a career in medicine—despaired of ever publishing her writing.

JKR 's first book, a novel for children called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published by Bloomsbury after many other publishers had turned it down. The initial print run was just 500.

But her second novel, then called The Heavenly Twins, was turned down by the Women's Press with a reader's report which complained that it did not, like her first, centre on childhood and the mother-and-daughter relationship. To this were added comments like childish and introspective which made MR feel suicidal. Lisa Alther , author of the highly successful and controversial Kinflicks, consoled her by talking of her own past rejections. The novel eventually emerged, rewritten, as The Visitation.

RR published her first novel, From Doon with Death, featuring the character Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford; she had written at least six novels before her first acceptance.

Thomas Harris of Covent Garden Theatre visited AMP to compliment her on a play, The Runaways, which she had apparently submitted to him.

It was rejected that August as a possible television play for the BBC . A successful revival took place in spring 2007 at Trafalgar Studios , London.

Besides Dead Fish, a second play by PG , Guinevere, was also produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1976. Gems speculates that it was never published because it was a short, one-woman play. She tried adding a second act and a male character, Arthur, but still did not succeed in finding a publisher.

She was inspired by the example of Hilda Marx , whom she had heard reciting her poetry. She wrote her own poems in her head, mostly while she was by herself and walking. Not until the poem was complete would she write it down and foreclose the option of changing it. The editor of Jüdische Rundschau published most of those she submitted in his children's section, saying they could have gone in the adult part of the paper if she were older.

She began this novel knowing nothing about writing as a profession. She wrote the entire manuscript in a set of children's copy-books.She finished it quickly, and her husband showed it to Samuel Jeyes , editor at the Standard. Jeyes sent EG a note the next day, saying, Elizabeth will do. May I come and see you?The novel, in letters from Elizabeth to her mother, first appeared in anonymous instalments in the fashionable journal The World, which began on 9 August 1899.When The World finished its serialization in early 1900, Jeyes took the novel to Gerald Duckworth , who agreed to publish it. At EG 's first meeting with Duckworth, in August 1900, he asked her to fill out the letters to make them more novelistic and less episodic. This meeting launched a career-long professional relationship with Duckworth , who published EG 's novels for the next thirty-three years.They agreed to publish her first novel under her name because her authorship had already been divulged and because she thought her name sounded like a nom-de-plume.The book sold for six shillings; Glyn received a fifteen percent royalty.

EG finished drafting a comedy, original not adapted, which, despite a prolonged battle with David Garrick , never reached either stage or print.

RH 's first-written novel, The Unlit Lamp, finally appeared after being rejected by ten publishers; it has a lesbian theme.

EH showed her Infants' Grammar to the bookseller Mr Criswick of Dorchester in about 1820, along with her poem Elgiva. He apparently hoped to have the publishing of it himself; and EH 's 1945 editor, Eric Gillett , supposed that it was in fact published at Dorchester. If this was the case, then no copies are known to survive; this is not so if publication was at London.

BH had her first short story accepted for Belgravia (formerly edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon ) after Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine had declined it. She went on to publish other contributions to Blackwood's; even by the time she first met Eliza Lynn Linton she was able to show her one or two little sketches which had appeared in magazines. Linton read them, kissed her, and proceeded to give her protection for her entrance into London literary society. She remained supportive and affectionately appreciative of Harraden for the rest of her life.

After an initial rejection, EH 's poem Told in the Firelight was accepted and published in Cornhill Magazine; she received ten pounds in remuneration.

Her method was to cut out her illustrations with great care, hand-colour any bad prints, and paste them on paper in chronological order. She added an annotated index, with explanations and remarks of my own on the pictures (the English ones only) written on the facing page. When she approached publishers about printing this—or a part of it—they rejected the project as too expensive. Part of her annotated material was exhibited in 1873; its loss some time since that date is deeply regrettable.

She worked on this book during her year of exploring London after graduating from university, enthralled by the writing process more intensely than she was ever to be again. She dedicated this book to the elder of her two brothers, Romilly Jenkins . The copy now at the University of Alberta belonged to her other brother, David . She based the story on an infatuation with a relative. The first publisher she approached was the firm of Gollancz . Victor Gollancz accepted the work on the spot, offering an advance of £60 (a lot of money to a young writer at that date) and first refusal of her next three books. This deal cemented EJ 's relationship with Gollancz as friend and mentor as well as publisher.

Her friend Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to George Smith of Smith, Elder on 10 February 1859 to urge him to publish this novel, which, however, she declared she had not read. He sent her a copy when it appeared. A new edition appeared three years later, in Smith, Elder 's Standard Authors series. Wordsworth is quoted on the title-page and before the final chapter: his eulogy of his wife as a perfect woman, nobly planned, and some lines about the effects of sorrow.

She had a very long and hard time submitting work and being rejected: her nadir was thirty-nine rejection slips in a single year. She later reported that at that time bush yarns were popular and there was little interest in the internal dramas presented in her fiction. No journal would take her fairly early story Dingle the Fool, and many of the longer pieces in her later story volumes had been repeatedly rejected by publishers. She finally found a way to get published by submitting stories to England and then having them sent on from there to the ABC in Sydney. She commented, however, that she would have gone on writing even if nothing was published.

This followed its rejection by managements in England, Ireland and America, the first pronounced by George Bernard Shaw and the second by W. B. Yeats . The first English-language production took place in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse on 19 February 1925. The play was not performed in London until 1926. It was revived in London in 1970 (directed by Harold Pinter ) and in 2006.

She was helped and encouraged in this work by her friend the novelist Walter Lionel George . This and her next novel were written on the dining-room table of her parents' house, with all the business, pleasure and strife of the family surging round. She wrote them,she said later, on a diet of Borrow , Fielding , Richardson , the Newgate Calendar and Johnson's Lives of the Highwaymen. On finishing the manuscript she sent it for an opinion to the Society of Authors under the pen-name E. C. Ticehurst, because she wanted it to be taken for a man's. On the Society's advice she used her own name when she sent it on, carefully revised, to the Literary Agency . It sold only eight hundred copies, yet for her next novel (Starbrace, 1909, which W. L. George called perhaps [her] most brilliant flight), she was offered a thirty-pound advance.