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.
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...
Reception
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Where her first two novels had been well reviewed, this one received not a single notice for three weeks (probably on account of its late-autumn publication date). SKS
feared she was being passed over or...
Textual Features
Sheila Kaye-Smith
This is, like Sussex Gorse, the story of a man driven by monomaniacal ambition, and like Jane Austen
's Sanditon (from which it could hardly be more different in tone) the story of a...
Textual Features
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Here she relates significant moments in her life to what she was reading at the time. She says that her reading, directed at first by chance and the choices of others, later moved towards what...
Intertextuality and Influence
Molly Keane
This, like Good Behaviour, is a black comedy set in a crumbling Anglo-Irishbig house, Durraghglass. Unlike Good Behaviour it sets its protagonist family (of the same generation as Aroon St Charles) in...
Textual Features
Annie Keary
All these lives and more are woven together. Mrs Edgecombe has been independently managing a large estate, and she and Walter cannot agree: Clemency could not help noticing the quiet masculine assumption of being necessarily...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
MAK
published, anonymously, her first, part-epistolary, religious novel, The Favourite of Nature: A Tale, which reflects the influence of her admired Jane Austen
.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
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Textual Features
Mary Ann Kelty
The book bears in various details the influence of Jane Austen
, though its overall project of pious didacticism is at odds with Austen's approach. The title-page quotes Rousseau
on the topic of the sensitive...
Textual Features
Mary Ann Kelty
At the end of the first volume Mortimer twice proposes to Eliza: once face to face and unpremeditatedly, then by letter. She does not accept him. By the end of the next volume he is...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
Her narratives of these emotional involvements lead her into analysis of the different effects of love on the two sexes. This analysis is founded on two women writers (identifiable although she does not name them)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
MK
found the inspiration for this novel in Jane Austen
's satire of gothic melodrama, Northanger Abbey. The tragic melodrama of this novel's love stories, however, brings it closer to the actual gothic tradition...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
Kennedy once again found her inspiration for this novel in the model of Jane Austen
. For Troy Chimneys, she extracted parts of the letters which Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra
.
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann.
