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.
Speaking at a Jane Austen
conference in 1993, MD
said that in this book she was doing something entirely new for her, in moving into, or close to, the occult.
Textual Features
Regina Maria Roche
Jane Austen
's Emma (in which this novel is mentioned) seems to have picked up some trifles from its plot. Roche's Marlowe hides his love for the impoverished Fanny because of his dependence on his...
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
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.
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
Sara Jeannette Duncan
The Imperialist features a double-stranded plot focusing on a Canadian brother and sister. Lorne Murchison pursues a connection with Britain through formal trade agreements while Advena Murchison unites the countries with bonds of affection when...
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
Q. D. Leavis
The book reflects the Leavis's lofty tone about that large majority of authors who fail to measure up to the best. Jane Austen
was not given a section—because, F. R. Leavis insisted, she was too...
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...
Residence
Mary Russell Mitford
The first period of poverty after his marriage caused him to move his family from Alresford in Hampshire. (MRM
later remembered the Hampshire countryside with warm affection, and delighted in its nearness to...
Residence
Anne Mozley
The garden, though not the house, was liable to flooding by the River Trent. John Wordsworth observed that the conversation at Barrow was as good as anything in Miss Austen
's novels.
Wordsworth, John, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, p. xii - xx.
xviii
Elizabeth...
Residence
E. M. Delafield
Virginia Woolf
did, however, visit EMD
, and wrote to her niece in November 1935 that Delafield lives in an old house like a character in Jane Austen
; whom she adores. But she has...
Residence
Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS
saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens
and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown.
103
she...
Residence
Mary Anne Barker
MAB
and her husband, Frederick Broome
, called their cottage at the sheep station, from their own name, Broomielaw. It stood in the Malvern Hills on the banks of the Selwyn River, attached...
