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.
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...
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Charlotte Brontë
CB
's comments on Jane Austen
, whom she first read at this time, reflect her own literary priorities: She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously...
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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.
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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
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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
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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's Susan unpublished), and booksellers at Wrexham and Liverpool were mentioned...
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Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS
edited a volume of selections from Jane Austen, for which she wrote an introduction.
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Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Harry N. Abrams.
108
Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Macmillan.
240
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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...
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P. D. James
PDJ
published a historical detective novel she said she wrote for fun and in order to combine two great enthusiasms (detection and Jane Austen
): Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
Crown, Sarah. “A life in writing: PD James”. Guardian.co.uk.
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Eliza Parsons
EP
's second gothic novel, The Mysterious Warning, A German Tale (another favourite of Austen
's Isabella Thorpe), appeared, with a frontispiece and dedication to the new Princess of Wales.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 687-8
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Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS
's earliest works, which emerged from a romantic sense of beauty, defined her for decades of readers. In the first phase of her writing career, from 1900 to about 1915, she sought the delicate...
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P. D. James
PDJ
gave the annual lecture to the Jane Austen Society
at Chawton House in Hampshire (where Austen
was a regular visitor); it was entitled Emma Considered as a Detective Story.
James, P. D. Time to Be in Earnest. Faber and Faber.
224, 250
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Olivia Manning
In 1971 OM
edited a volume of Romanian Short Stories for Oxford University Press
. She also wrote an introduction for a Pan
edition of Austen
's Northanger Abbey, published in 1979.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Textual Production
Catherine Hubback
CH
published her first book, a novel entitled The Younger Sister, which recapitulates and completes her aunt Jane Austen
's unfinished, unpublished early novel The Watsons.
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