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.
In her later years ES
set out to extend her reading. She tried Woolf
's A Room of One's Own (at the behest of Ethel Smyth
) and admired it. But she could not like...
Leisure and Society
Carola Oman
In a letter to the Times in 1962, CO
described a bookcase in her writing-room which held the works she described as All the Winners. For a writer of fairly conservative views and strong...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Ham
The story opens with the young Englishwoman Rhoda Ford (the unbeautiful one of two sisters) and her family in the west of Ireland, where her father has an entrepreneurial scheme. They try to come...
Intertextuality and Influence
Katherine Mansfield
She opens her review by evoking the experimental, critically controversial current state of the novel, before presenting the surprising picture of Night and Day sailing into port serene and resolute.
Majumdar, Robin, and Allen McLaurin, editors. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
79
The image of a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
MAK
published, anonymously, her first, part-epistolary, religious novel, The Favourite of Nature: A Tale, which reflects the influence of her admired Jane Austen
.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 521
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The plot opens when the young, urban, highly civilised, bossy London heroine, Flora Poste, decides (when her parents die leaving her an unexpectedly small income) to live off her exaggeratedly rustic Sussex relations. (Flora admires...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Taylor
Tomkins (whose words open the novel in very much the way that Sterne
's narrator opens A Sentimental Journey) is in search of a wife, but early rules out the heroine from consideration. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Before beginning this novel she asked the advice of her stepson Martin Amis
to help her choose between this and a present-day version of Austen
's Sense and Sensibility. He opted unhesitatingly for the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
As early as 1824 MRM
was asking the advice of friends as to whether they thought she could be a novelist.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 29
She added one of her frequent disclaimers: I write merely for remuneration...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Lavin
Another early work was Jane Austen
and the Construction of the Novel, Lavin's MA thesis.
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriett Mozley
Her letters, on the evidence of those included in Dorothea Mozley
's Newman Family Letters (published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
in 1962), are highly intelligent and entertaining. As a girl she rattles...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The novel is richly intertextual. Jane Austen
is a source of inspiration: Flora's sole occupational goal for the next thirty years is to collect material for a novel as good as Persuasion, but with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
Writing to Mary Russell Mitford
of her hope that they might meet, HM
acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me.
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett.
One or two Jane Austen
readers (recently Kathryn L. Shanks Libin
) have speculated that Austen may have been perpetrating a joke by attaching the scandal of GE
's married name and birth name (Dalrymple...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. S. Byatt
Here the first-person male narrator, a tiny dwarf-like man named Phineas Gilbert Nanson, on impulse abandons his work towards a PhD in English (Byatt skewers a gallery of predictably eccentric and pretentious academics), rejecting poststructural...
