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.
Sitwell chose two women from before and five from during the eighteenth century, ten from the nineteenth century, and two from her own.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
Author summary
Eleanor Sleath
ES
was a popular novelist who published six titles, mostly with the Minerva Press
, in little more than a decade, having begun just before the close of the eighteenth century. She sometimes intersperses poetry...
Publishing
Eleanor Sleath
This book was written during a highly social period of ES
's life, and advertised in February 1799.
Czlapinski, Rebecca, and Eric C. Wheeler. Sleath Sleuth. New Eleanor Sleath Biography. http://sleathsleuth.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/new-eleanor-sleath-biography/.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 761
Most copies having been no doubt read to pieces, this is now a very rare...
Literary responses
Eleanor Sleath
The Critical Review observed crushingly that vapid and servile imitations like this one were a severe penance for critics who had been seduced by Ann Radcliffe
into admiration for the modern romance.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 761
Jane Austen
Residence
Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS
saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens
and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown.
103
she...
Literary responses
Constance Smedley
This work was reviewed by Mary Webb
for the Bookman in January 1925 together with Ethel Sidgwick
's Laura: A Cautionary Story and V. H. Friedlaender
's The Colour of Youth.
Crawford, Mary, and Bruce Crawford. “Selected Bibliography of Writings By and About Mary Webb”. Mary Webb, Neglected Genius.
According to Smedley...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
CS
's biographer Loraine Fletcher
gives a whole chapter to Austen
's response to her work.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
303-17
Intertextuality and Influence
Dodie Smith
The book is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cassandra, a budding writer. As she explains, I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
Like most of AS
's work, this novel is playfully self-reflexive in its adherence to typical story structure. In a formulaic breakdown of essential narrative parts, The Accidental has a prescribed Beginning, Middle...
Textual Production
Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS
has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
The young Jane Austen
paid Emmeline the compliment of allusion in her comical History of England, 1791.Anna Seward
, on the other hand, condemned CS
for indelicacy because she had exposed her husband's...
Literary responses
Charlotte Smith
CS
's biographer Loraine Fletcher feels that in her Catherine the young Jane Austen
uses Ethelindeas a touchstone of literary intelligence for her characters.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
121
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering.
7: 188
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
120-1
Reception
Charlotte Smith
Jane Austen
transcribed a poem, Kalendar of Flora, from Minor Morals, perhaps in summer 1808 for her sister Cassandra.
Le Faye, Deirdre. A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family. Cambridge University Press.
204, 351
Leisure and Society
Edith Somerville
In her later years ES
set out to extend her reading. She tried Woolf
's A Room of One's Own (at the behest of Ethel Smyth
) and admired it. But she could not like...
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...
