Jane Austen

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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.
Photograph of a colourized print of Jane Austen, from a drawing by a Mr Andrews commissioned by Austen's nephew James Edward Austen Leigh as frontispiece to his "Memoir of Jane Austen", 1870 (fifty years after she died). She is shown seated, with a book on her lap, wearing a blue dress and light brown bonnet.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Isak Dinesen
When this, like ID 's first book, became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, she felt it would cheapen the recognition awarded the earlier work—showing that she misinterpreted this commercial honour as a purely critical one.
Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen. Penguin.
312
Publishing Margaret Drabble
On Jane Austen 's birthday, MD 's The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance appeared in the journal Persuasions.
Drabble, Margaret. “The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance”. Persuasions, Vol.
15
, pp. 75-88.
75-88
Intertextuality and Influence Margaret Drabble
Imagery of postpartum fluidity, particularly lactation, characterizes the lovers' growing passion and the descriptions of female sexual desire and orgasm. The narrative alternates between a schizoid third-person dialogue
Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Penguin.
130
and first-person narration as Jane attempts...
Textual Features Margaret Drabble
Frances Wingate is accustomed to working with ancient bones, to conferences in distant countries and interviews in glossy magazines—also to sudden plunges into howling despair. For reasons she does not understand, she has ended a...
Textual Features Margaret Drabble
Speaking at a Jane Austen conference in 1993, MD said that in this book she was doing something entirely new for her, in moving into, or close to, the occult.
Textual Production 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...
Textual Features Sara Jeannette Duncan
The Imperialist features a double-stranded plot focusing on a Canadian brother and sister. Lorne Murchison pursues a connection with Britain through formal trade agreements while Advena Murchison unites the countries with bonds of affection when...
Education Nell Dunn
ND was educated at a convent school, which she left at the age of fourteen. Reading of some texts which were vital to her experience—Jane Austen and Jean-Paul Sartre —came after she had left...
Literary responses Emily Eden
The Athenæum reported: A brighter book of travel we have not seen for many a day. It likened EE 's style to that of Lucie Duff Gordon and her wit, satire, and suggestion to those...
Intertextuality and Influence Emily Eden
EE 's preface explains that she first set this novel in what was then the present day: the pre-Reform-Bill, pre-railway era. She did not wish to update it in revising, so it is now set...
Literary responses Emily Eden
Marghanita Laski , who acknowledged the enjoyment purveyed by EE 's relish of polished cynicism, also felt she could be enjoyed only so long as Jane Austen is quite forgotten.
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Gale Research.
110
EE 's Indian writings...
Textual Features Maria Edgeworth
The title is ironic: the protagonist is an irritating simpleton (prefiguring Austen 's Mrs Bennet), whose very funny dialogue has its roots in ME 's Essay on . . . Self-Justification.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
320-2
According to...
Literary responses Maria Edgeworth
John Ward, later Earl of Dudley , who had at first admired ME 's tales, later compared her to her disadvantage with Jane Austen (whose name, however, he did not know) and suspected Richard Lovell Edgeworth
Family and Intimate relationships George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans (later GE ) accepted a proposal of marriage from a young artist, still unidentified, only to withdraw it when she apparently realised that her eager imagination had attributed to him attractions that...
Publishing George Eliot
In submitting this anonymous manuscript to Blackwood , Lewes invoked the names of Oliver Goldsmith (author of The Vicar of Wakefield) and of Jane Austen . The firm of Blackwood turned out to be...

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