Jane West

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Standard Name: West, Jane
Birth Name: Jane Iliffe
Married Name: Jane West
Pseudonym: Prudentia Homespun
Pseudonym: The Author of The Advantages of Education
JW , novelist, poet, and dramatist, became especially well-known during the 1790s for her novels' conservative message, in terms of both political and gender ideologies. Her less-known later work is arguably more complex and interesting.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Seward
Ashmun states clearly that the great love and passion of [Seward's] life was for John Saville ,
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
178
Vicar Choral at Lichfield, though he married somebody else. This relationship attracted some disapproving gossip: Bishop Thomas Percy
Friends, Associates Sarah Trimmer
She corresponded with Jane West , Elizabeth Carter , and Hannah More .
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge, 1989.
under West
Balfour, Clara. A Sketch of Mrs. Trimmer. W. and F. G. Cash, 1854.
Intertextuality and Influence Eliza Haywood
A more recent generation of feminist scholars has succeeded in locating EH in the developing tradition of women's fiction. Critic Mary Anne Schofield has argued that her heroines are feisty feminists. Paula Backscheider points out...
Literary responses Sarah Trimmer
ST 's work made a great impact. She was one of the twenty-four most-reviewed women writers of 1789-90.
Hawkins, Ann R., and Stephanie Eckroth, editors. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 3 vols., Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013.
The young Elizabeth Benger in her Female Geniad, 1791, called ST a successor to Dorothy, Lady Pakington
Literary responses Helen Maria Williams
It talked of the need to counter her poisonous false philosophy with antidotes from the writings of a More , a Hamilton , and a West .
Michael-Johnston, Georgina. Helen Maria Williams: Liberty, Sensibility, and Education. University of Alberta, 1998.
140
Reception Anna Seward
The writer Jane West , replying to heavy condemnation of AS from Thomas Percy , offered a model of candid judgement. She agreed that Seward's prose style was not English but insisted that her poetry...
Textual Features Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe 's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy , the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
Textual Features Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility uses, reflects in its title, and radically alters, the paired-heroines motif made popular by Jane West and others. If JA 's Dashwood sisters exemplify a pattern and a warning respectively, they nevertheless...
Textual Features Mary Hays
The plot follows the life-stories of two sisters (somewhat crudely distinguished for worldly selfishness on the one hand and prudent, generous sincerity on the other) and their brother, who is a spendthrift like his frivolous...
Textual Features Elizabeth Meeke
But the most interesting feature of Midnight Weddings is the discussion of novels and novel-writing with which it opens. Meeke defends the function of novels (which, of course, must offer a good moral) and the...
Textual Production Anna Seward
With this work appeared AS 's Ode to the Sun. Richard Lovell Edgeworth later categorically alleged that the best passages in the elegy were in fact written by Erasmus Darwin , and this story...
Textual Production Elizabeth Hervey
This was written quickly, but the American episodes reflect research.
Hervey, Elizabeth. “Introduction”. The History of Ned Evans (1796), edited by Helena Kelly, Pickering and Chatto, 2010, p. vii - xxii.
ix
The Irish edition has an extended, descriptive title (absent from at least the second London edition), which promises moral and critical remarks, Anecdotes of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Helena Wells
HW 's prefaces give some personal details and some opinions. She admires Jane West , and hopes the cause of women will succeed to that of Abolition (now safely achieved). She argues that there ought...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Eva Figes
Though she mentions such writers as Eliza Haywood and Mary Davys , she begins her detailed discussion with the 1790s (a time which twenty years on would be regarded as somewhat late in the history...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Hays
For the Analytical, Wollstonecraft early offered her Jane West 's A Gossip's Story, and Hays began her review with a defence of the value to society of the novel as a genre.
Waters, Mary A. “’The First of a New Genus’: Mary Wollstonecraft as Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, No. 3, pp. 415 - 34.
426

Timeline

9 June 1819
The library of the late Queen Charlotte was auctioned by Christie's ; it included Jane Austen 's works, plus titles by Catherine Cuthbertson , Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , Christian Isobel Johnstone , Alethea Lewis