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
Reception Penelope Fitzgerald
PF is on record as saying of her two genres of choice: I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often...
Reception Mary Hays
One of Jane Austen 's sisters-in-law owned a copy. Some reviewers objected both to content and arrangement. The European Review was not untypical in that although it expressed some admiration it also called for a...
Reception Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson , centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Reception Barbara Pym
Pym was in great demand at this point in her career, giving print, radio, and television interviews, for example, and meeting with the writer of the first dissertation on her work.
Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye. Editors Holt, Hazel and Hilary Pym, Macmillan.
304-5
She drew attention...
Reception Germaine de Staël
Benjamin Constant , formerly the lover of GS , represented her in his novel Adolphe as a woman whose mind was the most wide-ranging of any woman ever, and perhaps of any man,
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, pp. 12-35.
26
and...
Reception Eliza Parsons
The Critical Review judged this a novel not one of the first order, or even of the second, and its characters too darkly tinted. The two plots were not sufficiently connected and the language had...
Reception Jennifer Johnston
Critic Imhof Rüdiger attacked JJ (then the author of seven published novels) in 1985, arguing that she urgently needed to find new themes, and that her work was being compromised through self-repetition.
Imhof, Rüdiger. “’A Little Bit of Ivory, Two Inches Wide’: The Small World of Jennifer Johnston’s Fiction”. Etudes Irlandaises, Vol.
10
, pp. 129-44.
Johnston classifies reviewers...
Reception Freya Stark
Recommended by the Book Society and the Book Guild , The Southern Gates of Arabia also received high praise in the Daily Telegraph, among other papers. FS , rather surprisingly, was compared to Jane Austen
Reception Mary Wollstonecraft
Katharine Marion Metcalfe , a recent graduate at Oxford University , did something extraordinary in enquiring of Professor Sir Walter Raleigh whether materials existed for research on MW . Raleigh proposed that Metcalfe should edit Jane Austen instead.
Barchas, Janine. “The Lost Books of Austen Studies”. States of the Book. CSECS/SCEDHS annual conference.
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
Reception Mary Russell Mitford
Our Village made MRM a literary lion. She became a celebrity, and was entertained by dukes as the toast of the town.
Pigrome, Stella. “Mary Russell Mitford”. The Charles Lamb Bulletin, Vol.
66
, Charles Lamb Society, pp. 53-62.
58
Her tiny house and garden were swamped with trippers and celebrity-hunters. In...
Reception Vita Sackville-West
The enthusiastic review by J. C. Squire was not entirely welcome to VSW , since she regarded Squire as a silly old ass and all that.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
167
She feared being relegated to the category of...
Publishing Eleanor Sleath
This book was written during a highly social period of ES 's life, and advertised in February 1799.
Czlapinski, Rebecca, and Eric C. Wheeler. Sleath Sleuth. New Eleanor Sleath Biography. http://sleathsleuth.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/new-eleanor-sleath-biography/.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 761
Most copies having been no doubt read to pieces, this is now a very rare...
Publishing Anne-Thérèse de Lambert
The collection was published as The Works of the Marchioness de Lambert in London in 1749 with Thomas Carte named as translator of the advice-letters but not of the rest. Further editions or re-issues appeared...
Publishing Frances Burney
FB had worked on the story told in this novel since before her marriage. The heroine had been called variously Betulia, Arietta, and Clarinda.
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge University Press.
205, 209
The final product was dedicated to Queen Charlotte Sophia

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