Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Jane Austen
-
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.
Oliphant's views on the status of women shifted somewhat with time. She dismissed the women's suffrage petition, and represented women who supported suffrage as unnatural. Answering Barbara Bodichon
, she argued that marriage was...
Textual Production
Margaret Kennedy
During the early 1960s MK
read her paper Harriett Mozley
: A Forerunner of Charlotte Yonge, at the Charlotte M. Yonge Society
, of which, along with many of her writing friends, she had...
Textual Production
Georgiana Fullerton
GF
enjoyed a high literary and personal reputation during and immediately after her life. One article, published soon after her death in The Catholic World, compared her favourably with Jane Austen
, and claimed...
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
Here QDL
highlights Oliphant's anti-sentimental, critical view of Victorian county town insitutions and relations, and the comparatively independent, ironic attitude of the unstereotypical heroine, Lucilla Marjoribanks (large, strong, unsentimental, insubordinate to men and with...
Textual Production
Mary Stockdale
MS
(as Miss Stockdale) issued through her father
's firmThe Family Book; or, Children's Journal, translated from the French of Arnaud Berquin
, Interspers'd with Poetical Pieces written by the Translator...
Textual Production
Joan Aiken
JA
again partnered herself with Jane Austen
, completing the earlier of Austen's two unfinished novels as Emma Watson, The Watsons Completed.
This unfinished novel, a standing temptation to sequel-writers, was first completed by...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ
published a critical biography of another author of the past, Jane Austen
, for some of whose works she also wrote introductions.
LS read widely and intended to translate fiction by other Anglophone authors. In 1932, she began translating Austen
's Pride and Prejudice, but halted the project when she learned that one of her better-known...
Textual Production
Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
Textual Production
Michèle Roberts
In November 2011 MR
edited Wooing Mr Wickham, a collection of stories inspired by Jane Austen
or by Chawton House.
Roberts also selected the stories for this volume from those submitted to the...
Textual Production
Rebecca West
RW
produced several introductions to novels by other writers, including Jonathan Cape
's editions of Kathleen Coyle
's Liv (1929), Jane Austen
's Northanger Abbey (1932), and Sarah Orne Jewett
's The Only Rose and Other Tales (1937).
West, Rebecca. “Bibliography”. Rebecca West: A Celebration, edited by Samuel Hynes, Viking Press, pp. 761-6.
764-5
Textual Production
Willa Cather
In the 1920s WC
was working for a maximum of three hours a day, banishing her work from her mind during the rest of day, but keeping herself fresh for it. She said her only...
