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.
EMD
's charming, witty novels are characterized by acute observation and good-humoured social satire. Her stories often draw from her own experiences—as an Edwardian débutante, a novice in a religious order, a war worker, and...
Author summary
Eleanor Sleath
ES
was a popular novelist who published six titles, mostly with the Minerva Press
, in little more than a decade, having begun just before the close of the eighteenth century. She sometimes intersperses poetry...
Author summary
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Writing mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, SKS
published thirty-one novels, in addition to about twenty works in other genres: biography, criticism, saints' lives, country lore, and books of memoirs (one of...
Author summary
Joan Aiken
JA
was a popular and successful later twentieth-century writer of short stories and longer fictions for children, most of which are fantasies or have strong supernatural or mystery elements. She also wrote adult novels (both...
Author summary
Emma Tennant
ET
wrote and published in many genres between 1973 and the second decade of the twenty-first century, and often blended one genre with another.
At first a novelist (who later became a specialist in the...
Author summary
Sarah Green
Besides a conduct book, a translation, and a pamphlet, SG
wrote most fictional forms available to her: novels in several modes, stories, romances, and most notably mock-romances. She was one of the ten most prolific...
politics
Eleanor Rathbone
Nearly seventy, ER
volunteered for war work herself, and despatched her car (which she called Jane Austen after the novelist and the Austin
make of car) for active service.
Johnson, Richard William. “Associated Prigs”. London Review of Books, pp. 19-21.
21
Performance of text
Aldous Huxley
Austen
's Pride and Prejudice was released in the USA by MGM
as a Hollywood film, with screenplay by AH
and others.
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press.
357
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). http://www.imdb.com.
Performance of text
Elizabeth Inchbald
It was published by the end of the year, at the same time as a rival version by Stephen Porter
which used both titles (Lovers' Vows; or, The Child of Love) and which...
Performance of text
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Genlis' daughters gave performances of these plays to large audiences (up to five hundred people).
Dow, Gillian. “Books owned by Jane Austen’s niece, Caroline, donated to Chawton House Library”. The Female Spectator, Vol.
1 n.s.
, No. 4, pp. 1-3.
2
The work was several times translated into English (beginning in late 1780) as The Theatre of Education. A...
Occupation
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Meanwhile she prepared to receive evacuees from London, and volunteered for first aid work, nursing, and night shifts with the ARP (Air Raid Precaution)
.
This work gave her considerable free time, most of which she spent reading such authors as Austen
, Johnson
, Scott
, and Trollope
. She particularly admired the forms of Mansfield
's published scrapbook...
Occupation
Lady Cynthia Asquith
For her three weeks' work in this capacity she earned £900. She did even better in spring 1957 by appearing on an ITV
quiz programme, the $64,000 Question, to answer questions on the novels...
Occupation
Catherine Hutton
As well as collecting illustrations of costume, CH
was an early collector of autographs. (She began both these collections at a young age, but presumably had to start again from scratch after her losses in...
