Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Jane Austen
joked in a letter about taking this novel as fact. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three...
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
Ethel Wilson
Negative reviews seemed to repeat Macmillan
's original worry that the collection was half-cooked. Aunt Topaz was characterized by the Canadian Forum as a terrible bore, whom the reviewer found almost as tiresome to...
Literary responses
Emily Eden
The Athenæum reported: A brighter book of travel we have not seen for many a day. It likened EE
's style to that of Lucie Duff Gordon
and her wit, satire, and suggestion to those...
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...
Literary responses
Susan Ferrier
This novel too was a success, if not quite so resoundingly as Marriage (to whose reputation more than one reviewer referred).
Cullinan, Mary. Susan Ferrier. Twayne.
68-9
The author's sister Helen (Mrs Kinloch
), an early reader, approached it...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Critic Jenny Uglow
argues that My Lady Ludlow is an important—an original and brave
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
468
book—although its experiment in creating a feminine fiction based on women's lives, carefully observed, is not entirely successful. In terms...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jenkins
The novel was criticised by some for its exclusively upper-middle-class reach—a view which was energetically countered by Rose Macaulay
on a radio programme.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson.
107
The Times Literary Supplement welcomed with joy a novel where the...
Literary responses
Barbara Pym
In a negative review in the Sunday Times (headed The Loneliness of Miss Pym), Anita Brookner
described Pym's tone and characterizations as coldly detached and reductive, and complained of a determined sexlessness of the...
Literary responses
Mary Brunton
Brunton's English publisher, Longman
, registered in the year of publication that the book was in great demand and very much admired on the whole, though some complain of the later part of the work...
Literary responses
Catherine Hubback
Geraldine Jewsbury
's review praised the novel as among the best of a good crop that year, noting: The story is as quiet as one of Miss Austen
's, but the characters and incidents are...
Literary responses
Anne Mozley
George Eliot
not only praised this review in a letter, but also instructed her publisher to send a copy of her next novel, The Mill on the Floss, to Bentley's
expressly so that it...
Literary responses
Harriette Wilson
Admiration of HW
as a writer united historian Eric Hobsbawm
and editor Karl Miller
. Miller judged the memoirs a well-written serious work, as much a work of social history, a study of class and...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Reviews were extremely positive. Most expressed a sense of loss to English letters at EG
's recent death, and compared Wives and Daughters to her other well-loved book, Cranford. The Athenæum likened the style...
Literary responses
E. M. Delafield
Punch gave the novel a very positive review, which Heinemann
used in their advertising: An almost uncannily penetrating study of the development of a poseuse. Told with remarkable insight and a care that is both...
