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.
This collection shows a deliberate inclination towards subjects whose strangeness startles the reader with an unexpected perspective. The title of the book is a phrase applied to the audience in Concert at Long Melford Church...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Her topic here is the social complications that arise when a wife, unusually, has her own independent income.
Vargo, Lisa. “Lodore and the Novel of Society”. Womens Writing, Vol.
6
, No. 3, 1999, pp. 425-40.
435
CG
's preface calls this a Novel of the simplest kind, addressed by a woman to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Taylor
Tomkins (whose words open the novel in very much the way that Sterne
's narrator opens A Sentimental Journey) is in search of a wife, but early rules out the heroine from consideration. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
The story opens with a situation borrowed from Jane Austen
's Pride and Prejudice: a mother desperate to get five daughters safely married because the family estate is entailed away in default of a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes and very slightly alters four lines from Pope
beginning What gay ideas crowd the vacant brain,
Gore, Catherine. Mothers and Daughters. Bentley, 1849.
title-page
but whereas Pope's imaginary Teresa Blount
was daydreaming idly and innocently of the dukes and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen
of a great German contemporary of Austen:...
Intertextuality and Influence
U. A. Fanthorpe
With this volume, says UAF
, I entered the different world of S. Martin's, Lancaster, and of France; and I was just beginning to have things to say about the condition of women...
Intertextuality and Influence
Barbara Pym
The central characters here are Jane Cleveland, a kindly and somewhat fey Oxford
don, and Prudence Bates, Jane's former student and surrogate daughter. Jane's main preoccupation is matchmaking for Prudence: she likens herself not only...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Benson
For a period of time after Goodbye, Stranger, SB
did very little writing but a great deal of reading, including the novels of Jane Austen
. She said she felt extremely middle-aged
qtd. in
Bedell, R. Meredith. Stella Benson. Twayne, 1983.
11
at...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes the passage in Swift
's Gulliver's Travels where the King of Brobdingnag hears from Gulliver about English politics and marvels that human grandeur can be mimicked by such contemptible insects.
qtd. in
Gore, Catherine. The Hamiltons; or, Official Life in 1830. R. Bentley, 1850.
title-page
The...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Brooke
She thought it had been too long, with too little plot, and that the subscription method had not been to its benefit. Critic Juliet McMaster
believes that Jane Austen
had Emily Montague in mind in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Eleanor Trollope
It begins by relaying the story of Augustus Cheffington, whose marriage below his rank to Susan Dobbs is blamed for his inability to secure himself the respect of proper society or a position in the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Molly Keane
This, like Good Behaviour, is a black comedy set in a crumbling Anglo-Irishbig house, Durraghglass. Unlike Good Behaviour it sets its protagonist family (of the same generation as Aroon St Charles) in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Angela Carter
The opening parodies that of Austen
's Emma.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
207
The novel is both gothic and parody gothic, and uses science fiction as a vehicle for the discussion of ideas. The story is told from...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
As a child Betty Coles (later ET
) wrote plays (with very short scenes each demanding a new and elaborate setting) and stories. She said she always wanted to be a novelist.
qtd. in
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne, 1985.
