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.
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 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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
Her narratives of these emotional involvements lead her into analysis of the different effects of love on the two sexes. This analysis is founded on two women writers (identifiable although she does not name them)...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Margaret Kennedy
Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...
Textual Production
Margaret Kennedy
During the early 1960s MK
read her paper Harriett Mozley
: A Forerunner of Charlotte Yonge, at the Charlotte M. Yonge Society
, of which, along with many of her writing friends, she had...
Reception
Margaret Kennedy
Reviewers have likened Kennedy to Jane Austen
, one of her literary role models. In a review for the New York World, Beverley Nichols
stated that she would be a robust Jane Austen,...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
MK
found the inspiration for this novel in Jane Austen
's satire of gothic melodrama, Northanger Abbey. The tragic melodrama of this novel's love stories, however, brings it closer to the actual gothic tradition...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
Kennedy once again found her inspiration for this novel in the model of Jane Austen
. For Troy Chimneys, she extracted parts of the letters which Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra
.
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann, 1983.
While Annie is employed by the Curzon family, love develops between her and Lord Claude Douglas. He wishes he could forget who he is for her sake, but cannot do it. He sullies their pastoral...
Textual Features
L. E. L.
The novel also has a strong political element. It comments on the power of newspapers in national life, through reporting and editorials but also through advertising. Mr Delawarr is, says literary historian Edward Copeland, a...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
The story opens with a situation borrowed from Jane Austen
's Pride and Prejudice: a mother desperate to get five daughters safely married because the family estate is entailed away in default of a...
Publishing
Anne-Thérèse de Lambert
The collection was published as The Works of the Marchioness de Lambert in London in 1749 with Thomas Carte
named as translator of the advice-letters but not of the rest. Further editions or re-issues appeared...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Margaretta Larpent
This later diary, generally written daily at any odd moment, provides indexing of special events which reveals AML
's methodical character. Occasional months are missing here and there. The diarist offers penetrating comment on a...
Textual Features
Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML
blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
