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 Q. D. Leavis
Here QDL discusses some of Oliphant's personal experiences, motives for publishing, and the lingering cultural resistance to women authors: we note that still, as in Jane Austen 's family and age, one of the conditions...
Textual Features Margaret Oliphant
Elisabeth Jay points out that the title might suggest a bildungsroman with a female protagonist, like Emma by Austen , whose fine vein of feminine cynicism
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
60
Oliphant admired.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
66
But Hester, unlike Emma, is...
Textual Features Catherine Gore
The title of this novel, published in 1836, echoes and responds to Anna Brownell Jameson 's Diary of an Ennuyée, 1826. The hero, Byronic Lord Eustace Hartston, keeps the heroine, Lady Harriet Delaval, some...
Textual Features Patricia Beer
PB here considers a series of canonical authors, Austen , Eliot , Charlotte Brontë , and Elizabeth Gaskell , and the way that the Woman Question was handled in fiction. Critic John Mullan notes her...
Textual Features Viola Meynell
Through satire, gender issues emerge for the first time in Meynell's work: women are portrayed as fatuous, wanting nothing more than to please men; men, in their turn, are dull and ineffectual.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
153
VM 's...
Textual Features Sophia Lee
The preface to this book, newly written for its publication, is SL 's major critical statement about the woman's literary tradition and her own place in it. She mentions the hostile reception of her own...
Textual Features Elizabeth Bonhote
A third-person narrative relates how Ellen, gentle as the dove, harmless as the lamb, and modest, without being reserved,
Bonhote, Elizabeth. Ellen Woodley. William Lane.
1: 7
and her exemplary rural clergyman father succeed in redeeming and reforming the unprepossessing Edwin...
Textual Features Muriel Spark
Spark's introduction speculates about the neglect of Mary Shelley, suggests as possible cause the fact that no single, facile cliché can encapsulate her, and puts forward a witty and trenchant list of the clichés to...
Textual Features Mary Charlton
MC 's targets are the same as those of Jane Austen 's juvenilia: the motifs and the hyperbole of sentimental and gothic novels. It is not her heroine but her heroine's mother who is led...
Textual Features Kathleen E. Innes
Sources from which excerpts are taken include Jane Austen 's letters, William Cobbett 's Rural Rides, painter Anna Lea Merritt 's book A Hamlet in Old Hampshire, Hampshire Days by William Henry Hudson
Textual Features Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS 's letters to Scott show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Textual Features Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Though Theresa writes most of the letters in the book, the opening one, as often in women's epistolary novels at this date, is an exchange between men. Tomlins, however, does not attempt to capture a...
Textual Features Dorothy Boulger
The plot follows in the tradition of Austen 's Pride and Prejudice: chance causes the heroine and future hero to dislike one another on sight, after which she has to learn to overcome her...
Textual Features Maria Edgeworth
The title is ironic: the protagonist is an irritating simpleton (prefiguring Austen 's Mrs Bennet), whose very funny dialogue has its roots in ME 's Essay on . . . Self-Justification.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
320-2
According to...
Textual Features Sheila Kaye-Smith
This is, like Sussex Gorse, the story of a man driven by monomaniacal ambition, and like Jane Austen 's Sanditon (from which it could hardly be more different in tone) the story of a...

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