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.
Donna Seaman
, reviewer for Booklist, invoked the comparison of AD
to Austen
and acknowledged some substance to the parallel: indeed, she is a deceptively gracious storyteller, writing like an embroiderer concealing a sword...
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...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Henry James
's review in 1865 considered Braddon's success alongside that of Collins
, pronouncing her the founder of the sensation novel (defined as devising domestic mysteries adapted to the wants of a sternly prosaic...
Literary responses
Rachel Hunter
This novel was the second of RH
's to be affectionately mocked by Jane Austen
. Austen sent her niece the future Anna Lefroy
a letter purportedly for delivery to RH
herself, in the formal...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...
Literary responses
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
SFG
's importance to the influential Mary Wollstonecraft
can be gauged from the way that Wollstonecraft used and built on her writings, recommended them, measured others by their standard, and also did not hesitate to...
Literary responses
Barbara Pym
The sales of this second novel nearly doubled those of Pym's first: Excellent Women sold 5,477 copies in the two months to June 1952, while Some Tame Gazelle sold only 3,722 in the thirteen years...
Literary responses
Elizabeth von Arnim
The Benefactress received positive reviews in the US and England. A number of critics likened the author to Jane Austen
, while The Examiner referred to her as the Unknown Genius. The Daily Mail...
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...
Literary responses
Anne Brontë
Like the first, this second reviewer (probably H. F. Chorley
) found Agnes Grey both less objectionable and less powerful than Wuthering Heights.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
217-9
Many reviews concentrated wholly or solely on Emily's novel. The...
Literary responses
Barbara Hofland
Mary Russell Mitford
wrote to BH
, You are the mistress of our tears, as Miss Austen
is of our smiles, and I think you have the advantage.
Butts, Dennis. Mistress of our Tears, A Literary and Bibliographical Study of Barbara Hofland. Scolar Press.
19
Apart from somewhat overvaluing Hofland, this...
Literary responses
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Meanwhile the vogue for The Wild Irish Girl was immense: Dublin ladies were wearing scarlet cloaks and golden bodkins, as Glorvina and as Owenson did.
Campbell, Mary. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora.
71-2
She became (and remained more or less all her...
Literary responses
Sarah Harriet Burney
Charles Burney
, too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
lxii
Jane Austen
later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
VH
's associate Rebecca West
had strong praise for Their Lives. In a review in the Daily News on 7 March 1917, she called it a work of art. She found in it a...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Bowen
, in her laudatory review, likened the icy sharpness of ICB
's dialogue to the sound of glass being swept up one of these London mornings after a blitz.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.