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
Textual Features Mary Martha Sherwood
The story is told in the first person. Royde-Smith thought the protagonist, who is clever and learns from her mistakes, resembled the heroines of Jane Austen . Less like Austen is the fact that she...
Textual Features George Eliot
Ashton discerns here the influence of Jane Austen , but she deals with a wider social range and, unlike her predecessor, hints at dialect in the speech of her rustic characters.
Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. Hamish Hamilton.
176
But perhaps the...
Textual Features Catherine Hutton
CH had come seriously to admire Jane Austen : Her novels are pictures of common life, something like mine, but much more varied, and her character is either something like mine, or what I would...
Textual Features Virginia Woolf
She writes more directly of money, of the riches lavished through the ages on masculine institutions like the ancient universities, but here too her clinching example is one of the imagination: her contrast of the...
Textual Features Winifred Peck
The story opens with a young man returning from the First World War and ends with young people returning from the second. At the outset seventeen-year-old Miranda Rae, living in Devon with her family, receives...
Textual Features Edith Sitwell
Sitwell chose two women from before and five from during the eighteenth century, ten from the nineteenth century, and two from her own.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
Textual Features Mary Ann Kelty
The book bears in various details the influence of Jane Austen , though its overall project of pious didacticism is at odds with Austen's approach. The title-page quotes Rousseau on the topic of the sensitive...
Textual Features Mary Lavin
The novel is a treatment of Irish middle-class values. The domestic setting, opening strategy, and structure of the novel appear to be influenced by the work of Jane Austen , on whom ML had written...
Textual Features Anita Brookner
The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
Textual Features Elizabeth Jane Howard
Passages in The Lover's Companion are grouped according to different kinds of love situation (first love, love at first sight, unrequited love, etc.). Authors used include Jane Austen , Anthony Trollope , Oscar Wilde ,...
Textual Features Mary Ann Kelty
At the end of the first volume Mortimer twice proposes to Eliza: once face to face and unpremeditatedly, then by letter. She does not accept him. By the end of the next volume he is...
Textual Features A. S. Byatt
Her trenchant comments on the art of fiction include: If you don't see art as being profoundly related to the pleasure principle there's something wrong with you.
Friel, James, and Jenny Newman. “A. S. Byatt”. Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews, edited by Sharon Monteith et al., Hodder Headline, pp. 36-53.
39
The point of reading Jane Austen is...
Textual Features Catherine Hutton
Of particular value in CH 's letters are her comments on literature. She offered detailed views on (probably) Elizabeth Heyrick 's Exposition, a pamphlet about economics, admiring the language while doubting Heyrick's capacity to...
Textual Features Charlotte Yonge
The paired heroines, Emily and Lilias Mohun, have been traced to Austen 's Sense and Sensibility (though Yonge's pair are only two among a large family).
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House.
5
Hayter inadvertently gives Emily's name as Elinor.
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House.
5
Textual Features Mary Lavin
Mary O'Grady treats the subject of the unfolding of a whole human life—a woman's—from young adulthood to death. ML 's heroine here bears her own Christian name, and the heroine's husband, Tom O'Grady, bears the...

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