Jane Austen

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Standard Name: Austen, Jane
Birth Name: Jane Austen
Pseudonym: A Lady
Styled: Mrs Ashton Dennis
JA 's unequalled reputation has led academic canon-makers to set her on a pedestal and scholars of early women's writing to use her as an epoch. For generations she was the first—or the only—woman to be adjudged major. Recent attention has shifted: her balance, good sense, and humour are more taken for granted, and critics have been scanning her six mature novels for traces of the boldness and irreverence which mark her juvenilia. Her two unfinished novels, her letters (which some consider an important literary text in themselves), and her poems and prayers have also received some attention.
Photograph of a colourized print of Jane Austen, from a drawing by a Mr Andrews commissioned by Austen's nephew James Edward Austen Leigh as frontispiece to his "Memoir of Jane Austen", 1870 (fifty years after she died). She is shown seated, with a book on her lap, wearing a blue dress and light brown bonnet.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Eudora Welty
EW 's essay The Radiance of Jane Austen was reprinted in 2009 in Susannah Carson's A Truth Universally Acknowledged : 33 great writers on why we read Jane Austen.
Birth Catherine Hubback
Her parents were married at St Laurence, Ramsgate, Kent, on 24 July 1806.
“FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service”. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Her aunt Jane Austen had lived with her parents for some months early in their marriage, and later wrote verses to celebrate...
Birth Catharine Macaulay
Catharine Sawbridge (later CM ) was born at her father's estate of Olantigh, in the parish of Wye in Kent.
This is just across the River Stour from Godmersham Park, which was later...
Cultural formation Mary Russell Mitford
MRM 's parents came from the same class as Jane Austen : people of the gentry whose menfolk did professional work, with family links to the nobility. Her comments on the middling classes
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. L’Estrange, Alfred Guy KinghamEditor , Harper and Brothers, 1870.
2: 160
death Charlotte Yonge
She was buried at the foot of John Keble 's memorial cross in Otterbourne churchyard (despite a suggestion that she should be buried beside Jane Austen in Winchester Cathedral).
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 18. Gale Research, 1983.
18: 322
Dedications Catherine Hubback
CH had heard the Austen fragment read aloud in her youth, but did not have access to it as she wrote, which she did on a long visit to Wales. She dedicated her work...
Dedications Emma Tennant
ET moved into the field of Austen iana with Pemberley, A Sequel to Pride and PrejudiceJane Austen , dedicated to her mother .
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop.
Tennant, Emma. Pemberley. St Martin’s Press, 1993.
prelims
Education Mary Lavin
ML took her MA from University College, Dublin, with a thesis on Jane Austen for which she received first class honours.
Peterson, Richard F. Mary Lavin. Twayne, 1978.
20
Education Flora Macdonald Mayor
Although FMM 's father was, for the most part, more concerned with her fragile health than her academic development, the twin sisters received some home-schooling from their mother to quite a high level, since she...
Education Julia O'Faolain
JOF 's mother used to tell her suspense-driven fairy-tales, most of which were later published.
O’Faolain, Julia. Trespassers, A Memoir. Faber and Faber, 2014.
6
When Julia was very young they gave her nightmares.
O’Faolain, Julia. Trespassers, A Memoir. Faber and Faber, 2014.
2-3
Her father agreed to give her The Child's...
Education Alice Meynell
In the summer of 1852 Elizabeth and Alice Thompson (later AM ) began their education under their father's instruction. Recording her daughters' lessons, Christiana Thompson writes, Dear little angels do their writing . ....
Education H. D.
HD's father encouraged her education, although he refused to allow her to attend art school. Instead, she was encouraged to study mathematics and was tutored by her brother Eric . Eric also provided his sister...
Education Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR was taught until she was about eighteen by her schoolmistress aunt Arabella . In 1792 she was enrolled as a boarder at the Abbey School in Reading, where Jane Austen had spent a...
Education J. K. Rowling
Formative early reading included Richard Scarry and Kenneth Grahame 's The Wind in the Willows. Joanne Rowling did not care for Enid Blyton as a young child but acquired a taste for her later...
Education Nell Dunn
ND was educated at a convent school, which she left at the age of fourteen. Reading of some texts which were vital to her experience—Jane Austen and Jean-Paul Sartre —came after she had left...

Timeline

Early August 1591
Sir John Harington 's translation of Ariosto 's heroicromanceOrlando Furioso (which means something like Roland Run Mad) was published.
17 August 1759
In the Seven Years' War, the British navy won a crucial victory over the French fleet at the battle of Lagos, WestAfrica.
1765
The didactic History of Little Goody Two-Shoes was published by John Newbery: the most popular children's book of its period. It had fourteen reprints before 1814.
About 1766
Printer and engraver John Spilsbury perfected the dissected map which became the forerunner of the jigsaw puzzle.
By June 1766
James Fordyce anonymously printed his Sermons to Young Women. It went through ninety-five British reprints by 1850, plus half as many again in the USA.
About 27 March 1782
Eliza Hancock , aged nineteen, married Jean-François Capot de Feuillide , a Frenchman who claimed to be a count and who inaccurately supposed her to be a wealthy heiress.
April 1792
The Marseillaise was composed in France as a revolutionary song.
By August 1794
The Necromancer, or The Tale of the Black Forest, translated by Peter Teuthold from the German of Karl Friedrich Kahlert , appeared: it was one of the gothichorrid novels of Austen 's Northanger Abbey.
1796-1815
Throughout these war years the Bibliothèque britannique, published in Geneva, kept open cultural relations between France and England.
23 July 1796
Horrid Mysteries. A Story, translated by P. Will from Karl Friedrich August Grosse (one of the gothichorrid novels of Austen 's Northanger Abbey), was advertised as just out.
26 April 1798
Francis Lathom 's The Midnight Bell, A German Story, one of the gothichorrid novels mentioned in Jane Austen 's Northanger Abbey, was advertised as newly published.
25 June 1798
A new tax on the upper classes came into effect, levying two guineas for the privilege of running a coach or carriage with armorial bearings (that is, a coat of arms) painted on it.
10 May to 14 August 1813
The British Institution held a retrospective exhibition of 141 paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds at its Pall Mall Picture Galleries: a major event of the social season, both cultural and patriotic.
Barchas, Janine. What Jane Saw.
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
9 December 1826
The Literary Gazette printed a Key to Marianne Spencer Hudson 's silver-fork novel, Almack's (titled after the well-known elite gentlemen's club of the same name), which had already reached its second edition this year. The...