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.
This novel is narrated in a consistently controlled sardonic tone.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
5
Lucilla Marjoribanks keeps house for her father, and employs on Carlingford society the skills she has learned in studying political economy at school. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Like its predecessor, this novel recalls Jane Austen
, but this time the plot (at least the earlier part) is closer to that of Sense and Sensibility. Marcia, a sensible elder sister, makes a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Patricia Beer
This collection shows a deliberate inclination towards subjects whose strangeness startles the reader with an unexpected perspective. The title of the book is a phrase applied to the audience in Concert at Long Melford Church...
Intertextuality and Influence
Susan Ferrier
The Inheritance opens with what sounds like an allusion to Jane Austen
: It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride.
Cullinan, Mary. Susan Ferrier. Twayne.
75
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
CS
's biographer Loraine Fletcher
gives a whole chapter to Austen
's response to her work.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
303-17
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Gardam
Most of these stories inhabit JG
's familiar territory among suburban women of a certain age, but other protagonists are very different: a dirty old tramp, a reluctant male homosexual, and, in the title story...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rhoda Broughton
Critics have pointed to a range of influences and allusions in this novel. Kate Flint
has suggested that the representation of the sorrowful-eyed aesthete Francis Chaloner was a satiric jab at Oscar Wilde
, who...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hannah More
Harriet Corp
also responded, in 1817, with Coelebs Deceived, which opens with respectful critical dialogue about More's novel; but Corp's middle-aged protagonist finally decides to stay single. Mary Waldron
suggests that Jane Austen
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dodie Smith
The book is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cassandra, a budding writer. As she explains, I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Strutt
Influence of Frances Burney
's Evelina is perceptible here, and influence of Jane Austen
seems at least a possibility: a family estate is named Maple Grove, as in Emma, and the heroine's marriage to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Benson
For a period of time after Goodbye, Stranger, SB
did very little writing but a great deal of reading, including the novels of Jane Austen
. She said she felt extremely middle-aged
Bedell, R. Meredith. Stella Benson. Twayne.
11
at...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Eden
EE
's preface explains that she first set this novel in what was then the present day: the pre-Reform-Bill, pre-railway era. She did not wish to update it in revising, so it is now set...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Augusta Ward
The heroine is described as deriving from a long line of English gentry, Whig supporters of the Empire: a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
These provided the pattern for Thomas Moore
's very fashionable Irish Melodies.
Campbell, Mary. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora.
62
Either Moore's or possibly Morgan's are provided by Frank Churchill for Jane Fairfax along with the famous piano in Austen
's Mansfield Park.
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Whipple
Unfortunately as published it contains almost no dates. In the early pages DW
writes a deliberately commonplace style, but often records glimpses of people or overheard conversations for possible use in fiction. She relates the...