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
Occupation Q. D. Leavis
Working again through the British Council , Q. D. and F. R. Leavis lectured on Austen , Eliot , and Yeats in Rome, Milan, Padua, and Bologna.
Singh, G., and Q. D. Leavis. F.R. Leavis: A Literary Biography. Duckworth.
283-4
Occupation Barbara Pym
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 Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ was one of the founders of the Jane Austen Society , launched in 1940. She campaigned for the purchase (achieved in 1947) of the cottage at Chawton in Hampshire where Austen lived for her...
Material Conditions of Writing E. M. Delafield
In the year of this publication, 1935, Virginia Woolf wrote to her niece, Angelica Bell , I've been seeing E. M. Delafield who writes The Provincial Lady: she is called Dashwood really; Elizabeth Dashwood; and...
Material Conditions of Writing Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
This venture was triggered by the appearance on the market of Austen 's juvenile play Sir Charles Grandison, itself an adaptation from the novel by Samuel Richardson . London Weekend Television acquired an option...
Literary Setting Fanny Aikin Kortright
While Annie is employed by the Curzon family, love develops between her and Lord Claude Douglas. He wishes he could forget who he is for her sake, but cannot do it. He sullies their pastoral...
Literary responses Catherine Gore
The year after these two novels appeared, a writer in The New Spirit of the Age measured CG unflatteringly against the humour of Frances Burney or the lifelike precision of Jane Austen , but credited...
Literary responses Ann Radcliffe
AR 's rival M. G. Lewis finished reading Udolpho within ten days of its publication, though he had during the same time travelled from England to the Hague.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
93
In 1825 Ann Lister eagerly traced...
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 E. M. Hull
Patricia Raub views The Sheik as the precursor of the mass-marketed romances initiated by Harlequin Romance novels in 1957.
Raub, Patricia. “Issues of Passion and Power in E. M. Hull’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>The Sheik</span&gt”;. Women’s Studies, Vol.
21
, pp. 119-28.
123
The plot line which pits a young, beautiful, inexperienced, and aristocratic heroine against a tall...
Literary responses Mary Cholmondeley
None of these later novels achieved the success of Red Pottage. Critic Vineta Colby writes that MC 's last novels invited the neglect they received from critics and public alike, because of their extreme...
Literary responses Frances Jacson
The Critical Review did this novel proud, first listing it, then praising it warmly for its superior moral tendency.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
4th ser. 1 (1812): 668
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
4th ser. 6 (1814): 688
Sarah, Lady Davy , told Sarah Ponsonby
Literary responses Jane Taylor
Critic Stuart Curran calls this volume brilliant. He notes the resemblance of its fine irony
Curran, Stuart. “The I Altered”. Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, Indiana University Press, pp. 185-07.
192
to that of Jane Austen (despite the fundamental earnestness of Taylor's Dissenting attitudes). Presenting those attitudes as a crucial...
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, pp. 212-14.
213-14
She was a favourite writer...
Literary responses Emma Marshall
One of EM 's clerical admirers called this book a particularly strong instance of the way her heroines (if not quite up to Jane Austen 's Anne Elliot or Charlotte Yonge 's Violet in Heartsease...

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