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.
At university, she was President of both the student Music and Socialist societies, as well as a member of the Students' Union Council.
Gilbert, Sarah. “Bernice Rubens”. Cardiff University Magazine, Vol.
1
, No. 1.
BR
later found that her education slowed her development as a writer...
Textual Production
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.
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.
Intertextuality and Influence
Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS
opens her story with Jane Fairfax as a little orphan growing up in the family of Colonel and Mrs Campbell, whose naughty daughter Euphrasia is a likable foil to her throughout. She ends it...
Education
J. K. Rowling
Formative early reading included Richard Scarry
and Kenneth Grahame
's The Wind in the Willows. Joanne Rowling did not care for Enid Blyton
as a young child but acquired a taste for her later...
Education
Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR
was taught until she was about eighteen by her schoolmistress aunt Arabella
. In 1792 she was enrolled as a boarder at the Abbey School
in Reading, where Jane Austen
had spent a...
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
Gabriel
anticipated critics when he described Commonplace as a prose tale . . . rather in the Austen
vein.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Editors Doughty, Oswald and John Robert Wahl, Clarendon Press.
2: 818
Contrasting Commonplace, and Other Short Stories with tawdry romance,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2223 (1870): 734
the...
Textual Features
Regina Maria Roche
Jane Austen
's Emma (in which this novel is mentioned) seems to have picked up some trifles from its plot. Roche's Marlowe hides his love for the impoverished Fanny because of his dependence on his...
Literary responses
Regina Maria Roche
The Critical Review was reminded unpleasantly of Ann Radcliffe
(from whom, indeed, says Rictor Norton
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, passages are lifted without acknowledgement).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The Critical summed up this novel as...
Textual Production
Michèle Roberts
In November 2011 MR
edited Wooing Mr Wickham, a collection of stories inspired by Jane Austen
or by Chawton House.
Callow, Steven D. “A Biographical Sketch of Lady Anne Thackeray Ritchie”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
2
, pp. 285-7.
289
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The previously published essays include pieces on Austen
and Landseer
, and the early Toilers and Spinsters.
Textual Features
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
wrote frequently on lesser-known female writers. The collected essays in From an Island include, in addition to the piece on Austen
, one on Heroines and Their Grandmothers which contrasts the cheerful heroines of...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Rigby
In 1849, ER
's friend Sara Coleridge
called her the most brilliant woman of the day . . . . She is thoroughly feminine, like that princess of novelists, Jane Austen
.
Coleridge, Sara. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge. Editor Coleridge, Edith, Henry S. King.
301-2
Textual Production
Dorothy Richardson
In her correspondence Richardson addresses a great range of topics, including her own varied reading. She comments on women writers from Julian of Norwich
through Jane Austen
, Emily
and Charlotte Brontë
, George Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence
Samuel Richardson
Innumerable women novelists later conducted a dialogue (some admiring, some rebutting or revising) with SR
. Few could ignore his influence completely. Frances Brooke
wrote his biography; Anna Letitia Barbauld
edited his letters, and Jane Austen