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
Reception Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has been filmed repeatedly for both television and the cinema, as well as being made the subject of musicals, plays, and a ballet performed by the London Children's Ballet in 1997 and 2008...
Reception Mary Russell Mitford
Mitford was often comical about her own letters: on one occasion she likened them to those of Austen 's Mr Collins.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 291
Some may prefer the often astringent letters of her old age, when...
Reception Penelope Fitzgerald
PF is on record as saying of her two genres of choice: I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often...
Reception Eudora Welty
Like Austen 's Mansfield Park, Delta Wedding has been contradictorily read, some seeing its patriarchal estate as embodying utopia and some as dystopia. Reviewer Claudia Roth Pierpont argued in The New Yorker that Welty...
Reception Mary Hays
One of Jane Austen 's sisters-in-law owned a copy. Some reviewers objected both to content and arrangement. The European Review was not untypical in that although it expressed some admiration it also called for a...
Reception Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson , centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Reception Jennifer Johnston
Critic Imhof Rüdiger attacked JJ (then the author of seven published novels) in 1985, arguing that she urgently needed to find new themes, and that her work was being compromised through self-repetition.
Imhof, Rüdiger. “’A Little Bit of Ivory, Two Inches Wide’: The Small World of Jennifer Johnston’s Fiction”. Etudes Irlandaises, Vol.
10
, pp. 129-44.
Johnston classifies reviewers...
Reception Flora Macdonald Mayor
The novel established FMM 's reputation for precise use of prose,
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
60741 (4 October 1980): 8
received good reviews, and very nearly won the Polignac Prize.
Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists, Macmillan.
45
FMM was judged sensitive yet detached, firm and...
Reception E. H. Young
An international conference, The Life and Work of Emily Hilda Young, was held in Bristol, organised by Stella Dean and Austen scholar Maggie Lane .
Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “’She must be a very good novelist’: Rereading E. H. Young (1880-1949)”. English Studies in Canada, Vol.
27
, No. 3, pp. 303-31.
324
Reception Charlotte Smith
Jane Austen transcribed a poem, Kalendar of Flora, from Minor Morals, perhaps in summer 1808 for her sister Cassandra.
Le Faye, Deirdre. A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family. Cambridge University Press.
204, 351
Reception Catherine Crowe
CC 's works were quickly made available in cheap editions, fit for the perusal of all classes.
Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland.
Partly by this means, she managed to attract many readers during the span of her career. Early critic...
Reception Jane West
JW was well-known as a productive writer who nevertheless put out a great deal of domestic labour. Jane Austen , marvelling at her sister's time management skills, remarked: how good Mrs. West cd [sic] have...
Reception Lucy Cary
Patrick Cary , the biographer's brother (himself a priest and poet), was said by the nineteenth-century editor to have made cuts in LC 's work based on his dislike of over-feminine material. But modern...
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,...
Reception Susanna Centlivre
SC hinted in A Woman's Case that her husband was upset at her threatening his livelihood with the political rashness of her dedication. The man-in-skirts role became a favourite of David Garrick , which kept...

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