Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...
Textual Production
Margaret Kennedy
During the early 1960s MK
read her paper Harriett Mozley
: A Forerunner of Charlotte Yonge, at the Charlotte M. Yonge Society
, of which, along with many of her writing friends, she had...
Reception
Margaret Kennedy
Reviewers have likened Kennedy to Jane Austen
, one of her literary role models. In a review for the New York World, Beverley Nichols
stated that she would be a robust Jane Austen,...
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...
Textual Features
L. E. L.
The novel also has a strong political element. It comments on the power of newspapers in national life, through reporting and editorials but also through advertising. Mr Delawarr is, says literary historian Edward Copeland, a...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
The story opens with a situation borrowed from Jane Austen
's Pride and Prejudice: a mother desperate to get five daughters safely married because the family estate is entailed away in default of a...
Publishing
Anne-Thérèse de Lambert
The collection was published as The Works of the Marchioness de Lambert in London in 1749 with Thomas Carte
named as translator of the advice-letters but not of the rest. Further editions or re-issues appeared...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Margaretta Larpent
This later diary, generally written daily at any odd moment, provides indexing of special events which reveals AML
's methodical character. Occasional months are missing here and there. The diarist offers penetrating comment on a...
Textual Features
Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML
blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
Textual Production
Marghanita Laski
ML
went on to write several literary biographies: Jane Austen
and Her World (1969), and George Eliot
and Her World (1973), as well as her late biography of Kipling The work on Austen includes 137...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marghanita Laski
She insists that even Jane Austen
. . . could write letters of a bitchiness and coarseness not inferrable from the impeccable sense of human values in her books.
Laski, Marghanita. “To the Editor: ’George Eliot and Her World’”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 3725, p. 869.
869
She posits an underlying double...
Education
Mary Lavin
ML
took her MA from University College, Dublin, with a thesis on Jane Austen
for which she received first class honours.
Peterson, Richard F. Mary Lavin. Twayne.
20
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Lavin
Another early work was Jane Austen
and the Construction of the Novel, Lavin's MA thesis.
Textual Features
Mary Lavin
The novel is a treatment of Irish middle-class values. The domestic setting, opening strategy, and structure of the novel appear to be influenced by the work of Jane Austen
, on whom ML
had written...
Textual Features
Mary Lavin
Mary O'Grady treats the subject of the unfolding of a whole human life—a woman's—from young adulthood to death. ML
's heroine here bears her own Christian name, and the heroine's husband, Tom O'Grady, bears the...