Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Sitwell chose two women from before and five from during the eighteenth century, ten from the nineteenth century, and two from her own.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
Textual Features
Virginia Woolf
She writes more directly of money, of the riches lavished through the ages on masculine institutions like the ancient universities, but here too her clinching example is one of the imagination: her contrast of the...
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Q. D. Leavis
Here QDL
discusses some of Oliphant's personal experiences, motives for publishing, and the lingering cultural resistance to women authors: we note that still, as in Jane Austen
's family and age, one of the conditions...
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Sophia Lee
The preface to this book, newly written for its publication, is SL
's major critical statement about the woman's literary tradition and her own place in it. She mentions the hostile reception of her own...
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Elizabeth Bonhote
A third-person narrative relates how Ellen, gentle as the dove, harmless as the lamb, and modest, without being reserved,
Bonhote, Elizabeth. Ellen Woodley. William Lane.
1: 7
and her exemplary rural clergyman father succeed in redeeming and reforming the unprepossessing Edwin...
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Charlotte Yonge
The paired heroines, Emily and Lilias Mohun, have been traced to Austen
's Sense and Sensibility (though Yonge's pair are only two among a large family).
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House.
5
Hayter inadvertently gives Emily's name as Elinor.
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House.
5
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Mary Charlton
MC
's targets are the same as those of Jane Austen
's juvenilia: the motifs and the hyperbole of sentimental and gothic novels. It is not her heroine but her heroine's mother who is led...
The plot follows in the tradition of Austen
's Pride and Prejudice: chance causes the heroine and future hero to dislike one another on sight, after which she has to learn to overcome her...
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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...
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Sheila Kaye-Smith
This is, like Sussex Gorse, the story of a man driven by monomaniacal ambition, and like Jane Austen
's Sanditon (from which it could hardly be more different in tone) the story of a...
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Eudora Welty
The word regional, said Welty, is careless, condescending, and an outsider's term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing.Jane Austen
, theBrontësisters
, and the writers...
The novel also has a strong political element. It comments on the power of newspapers in national life, through reporting and editorials but also through advertising. Mr Delawarr is, says literary historian Edward Copeland, a...
