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 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 Violet Hunt
VH 's associate Rebecca West had strong praise for Their Lives. In a review in the Daily News on 7 March 1917, she called it a work of art. She found in it a...
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 Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
SFG 's importance to the influential Mary Wollstonecraft can be gauged from the way that Wollstonecraft used and built on her writings, recommended them, measured others by their standard, and also did not hesitate to...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
Mary Russell Mitford wrote to BH , You are the mistress of our tears, as Miss Austen is of our smiles, and I think you have the advantage.
qtd. in
Butts, Dennis. Mistress of our Tears, A Literary and Bibliographical Study of Barbara Hofland. Scolar Press, 1992.
19
Apart from somewhat overvaluing Hofland, this...
Literary responses Henrietta Sykes
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 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 Catherine Sinclair
The Athenæum reviewer somehow detected similarities between this book and the work of Jane Austen .
Athenæum. J. Lection.
964 (18 April 1846): 395
The Christian Examiner expressed anxiety regarding a literary heroine abstaining from the conventional route...
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, 1984.
68-9
The author's sister Helen (Mrs Kinloch ), an early reader, approached it...
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 Louisa May Alcott
Following her death, G. K. Chesterton in a laudatory (if sexist) review classed LMA with Austen as an early realist, and praised her apt depictions of human truths.
Chesterton, G. K. “Louisa Alcott”. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, G. K. Hall, 1984, pp. 212-14.
213-14
She was a favourite writer...
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 Isabella Neil Harwood
This novel generated a large amount of attention and positive reviews. They all made some points in common: they loved the plot, the way Minnie/Minna's character developed, the originality and the sustained interest it provided...
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 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...

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