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.
The story opens with a young man returning from the First World War and ends with young people returning from the second. At the outset seventeen-year-old Miranda Rae, living in Devon with her family, receives...
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Anita Brookner
The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
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Elizabeth Jane Howard
Passages in The Lover's Companion are grouped according to different kinds of love situation (first love, love at first sight, unrequited love, etc.). Authors used include Jane Austen
, Anthony Trollope
, Oscar Wilde
,...
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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...
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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...
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A. S. Byatt
Her trenchant comments on the art of fiction include: If you don't see art as being profoundly related to the pleasure principle there's something wrong with you.
Friel, James, and Jenny Newman. “A. S. Byatt”. Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews, edited by Sharon Monteith et al., Hodder Headline, pp. 36-53.
39
The point of reading Jane Austen
is...
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Catherine Hutton
Of particular value in CH
's letters are her comments on literature. She offered detailed views on (probably) Elizabeth Heyrick
's Exposition, a pamphlet about economics, admiring the language while doubting Heyrick's capacity to...
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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...
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Charlotte Yonge
The paired heroines, Emily and Lilias Mohun, have been traced to Austen
's Sense and Sensibility (though Yonge's pair are only two among a large family).
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House.
5
Hayter inadvertently gives Emily's name as Elinor.
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House.
5
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Margaret Drabble
Frances Wingate is accustomed to working with ancient bones, to conferences in distant countries and interviews in glossy magazines—also to sudden plunges into howling despair. For reasons she does not understand, she has ended a...
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Anne Katharine Elwood
Her narratives detail the life events, character, appearance, and publication histories of the various authors. Frequently, as in the case of Austen
, she devotes more time to sketching a physical and mental character than...
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Eudora Welty
The word regional, said Welty, is careless, condescending, and an outsider's term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing.Jane Austen
, theBrontësisters
, and the writers...
The series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
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Margaret Drabble
Speaking at a Jane Austen
conference in 1993, MD
said that in this book she was doing something entirely new for her, in moving into, or close to, the occult.