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.
The series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
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 Features
Edith Sitwell
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
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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...
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...
The book reflects the Leavis's lofty tone about that large majority of authors who fail to measure up to the best. Jane Austen
was not given a section—because, F. R. Leavis insisted, she was too...
Textual Features
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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Catherine Hubback
The younger sister is Emma Watson, who has been educated away from home, and who on returning to her impoverished family finds herself out of sympathy with her elder sisters' quest to attract husbands. As...
Textual Features
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 title of this novel, published in 1836, echoes and responds to Anna Brownell Jameson
's Diary of an Ennuyée, 1826. The hero, Byronic Lord Eustace Hartston, keeps the heroine, Lady Harriet Delaval, some...
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...