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.
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...
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
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Though Theresa writes most of the letters in the book, the opening one, as often in women's epistolary novels at this date, is an exchange between men. Tomlins, however, does not attempt to capture a...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
Muriel Spark
Spark's introduction speculates about the neglect of Mary Shelley, suggests as possible cause the fact that no single, facile cliché can encapsulate her, and puts forward a witty and trenchant list of the clichés to...
Textual Features
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...
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...
Textual Features
Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
's letters to Scott
show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Textual Production
Rose Tremain
RT
published a novel entitled Music and Silence, which she dedicated to her daughter, Eleanor.
Scholar John Mullan
has related the title to others employing two abstract nouns, like Elizabeth Inchbald
's Nature and...
Textual Production
Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS
published a largely epistolary novel which is designed as a companion piece to Jane Austen
's Emma. Entitled Jane Fairfax: A New Novel, it is written in a pastiche of early-nineteenth-century style.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
SW
wrote her foreword to Dancing with Mr Darcy. Stories Inspired by Jane Austen
and Chawton House Library, selected in a competition which she had also judged, and published this year.
Waters, Sarah. “Foreword”. Dancing with Mr Darcy, Honno, pp. 1-4.
4
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
Spark's first Brontë project was a group biography of the whole family, including the parents. In June 1949 she felt like a pregnant tigress with this work. It was to be published by Lindsay Drummond
Textual Production
Emma Parker
The title-page quoted Pope
's dictum that woman's a contradiction still.
Parker, Emma. Elfrida, Heiress of Belgrove. B. Crosby.
title-page
Feminist Companion Archive.
The publisher was Crosby
(who at this date was holding Jane Austen
's Susan unpublished), and booksellers at Wrexham and Liverpool were mentioned...
Textual Production
Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS
edited a volume of selections from Jane Austen, for which she wrote an introduction.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Melesina Trench
Because a grand-daughter (Mary-Melusina, daughter of Richard Chenevix Trench) married a son of James Edward Austen-Leigh
(first biographer of his aunt Jane Austen
), MT
's papers are now housed with the Austen-Leigh papers at...
