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.
In a single volume, ST
's Jane Austen
and Her Works offered a short biography and a plot summary of the major novels, interspersed with critical commentary.
Tytler, Sarah. Jane Austen and Her Works. Cassell, Petter, Galpin.
prelims
Textual Production
Deborah Moggach
DM
has written a number of TV screenplays, both from her own prose and that of others, and in the form of original scripts, from which several of her novels were expanded. She has adapted...
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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)...
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Deborah Moggach
DM
has said of adapting Austen
that Pride and Prejudicereally is the perfect story, beautifully paced with its terrible reversals and ironies, and has been a treat to adapt. Also quite daunting, as the...
Textual Production
Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF
sent to Anne Grant
are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...
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E. M. Forster
EMF
published Abinger Harvest, a collection of essays which includes Notes on the English Character, several pieces on India, and criticism of particular writers, including Jane Austen
.
Burra, Peter. “Mr E. M. Forster Past & Present”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1781, p. 239.
239
Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean. A Bibliography of E. M. Forster. Clarendon.
47-8
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Emma Tennant
In the same year she published Tess, which is based on and continues the story of Hardy
's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
She followed these the next year with a return to Austen
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Q. D. Leavis
QDL
was arranging her lectures and essays on Jane Austen
into book form. Despite interest from publishers and although QDL
continued to write regularly on Austen, the monograph was never completed.
MacKillop, Ian. F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. Allen Lane.
263, 339-40
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Joan Aiken
JA
published Mansfield Revisited, A Novel, a sequel to Austen
's Mansfield Park and a harbinger of escalation in fiction of this type.
“Joan Aiken”. Fantastic Fiction.
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.
Callow, Steven D. “A Biographical Sketch of Lady Anne Thackeray Ritchie”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
2
, pp. 285-7.
289
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Margaret Drabble
MD
made her journalism debut early. In 1967 she wrote in the Guardian about the accomplishment of the sexual revolution brought about by the contraceptive pill. It was a major component of women's liberation, she...
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Georgette Heyer
GH
's next Regency romance, Bath Tangle (set in a place whose very name evokes Jane Austen
), features another heroine who needs special permission to marry.
Hodge, Jane Aiken. The Private World of Georgette Heyer. Bodley Head.