Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
As controversy has been Henry's domain, reading has been Charlotte's. For ever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. Reading has taught her how sex...
Intertextuality and Influence
Viola Meynell
VM
moves away from theological influence here, as her prose becomes dispassionate and satiric. This novel lacks plot interest; its strength lies in its emotional texture. In a manner that has been likened to Jane Austen
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Lively
Some stories are neatly turned but may seem a little perfunctory, like Abroad, about entitled young people, or Mrs Bennet after Austen
's character, about the continuing pressure for girls to marry or for...
Intertextuality and Influence
Barbara Pym
The central characters here are Jane Cleveland, a kindly and somewhat fey Oxford
don, and Prudence Bates, Jane's former student and surrogate daughter. Jane's main preoccupation is matchmaking for Prudence: she likens herself not only...
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
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
Mary Lavin
Another early work was Jane Austen
and the Construction of the Novel, Lavin's MA thesis.
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
Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS
opens her story with Jane Fairfax as a little orphan growing up in the family of Colonel and Mrs Campbell, whose naughty daughter Euphrasia is a likable foil to her throughout. She ends it...
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
Elizabeth Taylor
As a child Betty Coles (later ET
) wrote plays (with very short scenes each demanding a new and elaborate setting) and stories. She said she always wanted to be a novelist.
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne.
2
At twelve...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Eleanor Trollope
It begins by relaying the story of Augustus Cheffington, whose marriage below his rank to Susan Dobbs is blamed for his inability to secure himself the respect of proper society or a position in the...
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
Grace Elliott
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...
