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.
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 Mary Wollstonecraft
Katharine Marion Metcalfe , a recent graduate at Oxford University , did something extraordinary in enquiring of Professor Sir Walter Raleigh whether materials existed for research on MW . Raleigh proposed that Metcalfe should edit Jane Austen instead.
Barchas, Janine. “The Lost Books of Austen Studies”. States of the Book. CSECS/SCEDHS annual conference.
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
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 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 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
Publishing E. H. Young
This was the first novel she wrote after moving from Bristol to London. It went on to a further change of title in the United States, where it appeared in 1927 as The...
Publishing Flora Thompson
The Ladies Companion printed most of a winning competition entry by FT (who was not yet an author), an essay required to capture in 300 words her understanding of Jane Austen 's success.
Lindsay, Gillian. Flora Thompson: The Story of the Lark Rise Writer. Hale.
81 and n3
Publishing Ethel Wilson
The book was produced in England but copies shipped to Canada bore a Canadian imprint.
Stouck, David. Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography. University of Toronto Press.
110
Publication was delayed for some time. Upon first receiving the manuscript in early 1945, EW 's editors at Macmillan

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.