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.
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
Viola Meynell
Through satire, gender issues emerge for the first time in Meynell's work: women are portrayed as fatuous, wanting nothing more than to please men; men, in their turn, are dull and ineffectual.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
Spark's introduction speculates about the neglect of Mary Shelley, suggests as possible cause the fact that no single, facile cliché can encapsulate her, and puts forward a witty and trenchant list of the clichés to...
Textual Features
Q. D. Leavis
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
Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
's letters to Scott
show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Though Theresa writes most of the letters in the book, the opening one, as often in women's epistolary novels at this date, is an exchange between men. Tomlins, however, does not attempt to capture a...
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...
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.
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
SW
wrote her foreword to Dancing with Mr Darcy. Stories Inspired by Jane Austen
and Chawton House Library, selected in a competition which she had also judged, and published this year.
Waters, Sarah. “Foreword”. Dancing with Mr Darcy, Honno, pp. 1-4.
4
Textual Production
Margaret Kennedy
During the early 1960s MK
read her paper Harriett Mozley
: A Forerunner of Charlotte Yonge, at the Charlotte M. Yonge Society
, of which, along with many of her writing friends, she had...
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
Spark's first Brontë project was a group biography of the whole family, including the parents. In June 1949 she felt like a pregnant tigress with this work. It was to be published by Lindsay Drummond
Textual Production
Georgiana Fullerton
GF
enjoyed a high literary and personal reputation during and immediately after her life. One article, published soon after her death in The Catholic World, compared her favourably with Jane Austen
, and claimed...
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
Here QDL
highlights Oliphant's anti-sentimental, critical view of Victorian county town insitutions and relations, and the comparatively independent, ironic attitude of the unstereotypical heroine, Lucilla Marjoribanks (large, strong, unsentimental, insubordinate to men and with...
Textual Production
Emma Parker
The title-page quoted Pope
's dictum that woman's a contradiction still.
Parker, Emma. Elfrida, Heiress of Belgrove. B. Crosby.
title-page
Feminist Companion Archive.
The publisher was Crosby
(who at this date was holding Jane Austen
's Susan unpublished), and booksellers at Wrexham and Liverpool were mentioned...
