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
Literary responses Sarah Harriet Burney
Charles Burney , too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
lxii
Jane Austen later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...
Literary responses Georgiana Fullerton
Henry Fothergill Chorley , reviewing the novel for the Athenæum, found Grantley Manorhaunted by the intertextual spectre of Jane Austen 's Emma; he also drew parallels with Frances Burney 's Cecilia...
Literary responses Elizabeth Inchbald
A Simple Story was praised by no less a modern authority than Q. D. Leavis ,
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
(8 September 1989): 964
and received a more recent accolade from Terry Castle as the most elegant English fiction...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
Like the first, this second reviewer (probably H. F. Chorley ) found Agnes Grey both less objectionable and less powerful than Wuthering Heights.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
217-9
Many reviews concentrated wholly or solely on Emily's novel. The...
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Critics have felt that GH 's Regency novels mutated gradually from romance to comedy of manners. Of course no clear line can be drawn between the two. Some reviewers compared Heyer with Jane Austen because...
Literary responses Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland thinks that this is the most challenging of LCB 's novels because of the complex interrelationship, in Delamere, between aristocratic pastimes, the arts, and the Whig aristocracy. He sees the amateur theatricals as...
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Bowen , in her laudatory review, likened the icy sharpness of ICB 's dialogue to the sound of glass being swept up one of these London mornings after a blitz.
qtd. in
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
160
ICB received a...
Literary responses Diana Athill
Through her great age and greater panache DA became something of a cult figure. Edward Field wrote that she functioned for the British public as the Chief Guide to Old Age.
Field, Edward. “Edward Field’s Introduction”. Letters to a Friend, 2012, p. xi - xx.
xx
She was awarded...
Literary responses George Eliot
John Morley , anonymously in the Saturday Review, noted that [o]ne of the puzzles, which runs pathetically through Felix Holt as through Romola and the The Mill on the Floss, is the evil...
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Laski argued that the taste for popular fiction stemmed from the fact that the serious modern novel had decided to deny itself the amenity of the shapely story satisfactorily resolved, so that compulsive novel readers...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen 's nephew James Austen-Leigh compared it to the work of Austen and Scott ...
Literary responses Ann Radcliffe
AR 's rival M. G. Lewis finished reading Udolpho within ten days of its publication, though he had during the same time travelled from England to the Hague.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
93
In 1825 Ann Lister eagerly traced...
Literary responses Isak Dinesen
When this, like ID 's first book, became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, she felt it would cheapen the recognition awarded the earlier work—showing that she misinterpreted this commercial honour as a purely critical one.
Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen. Penguin, 1984.
312
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Joanna Cannan (a friend of GH ) based a character on her in No Walls of Jasper (1930) who is described in Heyeresque style. She is not beautiful, not pretty; her nose was too large...

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