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.
JA
published a pendant to yet another Austen
novel: Lady Catherine's Necklace, which foregrounds minor characters from Pride and Prejudice and adds a number of new ones.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production
Catherine Gore
In The Cabinet MinisterCG
borrowed the foundations of a plot from Jane Austen
once more, in the story of an impoverished sister and brother, Bessy and Frank Grenfell, brought up out of reluctant charity...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ
contributed an introduction to a volume, the seventh in John Lehmann
's The Chiltern Library, published in 1947 and containing two titles by Elizabeth Gaskell
. In her introduction to Thackeray
's Vanity...
little book of criticism titled Jane Austen
, 1775-1817 for the British Book News series Writers and Their Work.
Staley, Thomas F., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 34. Gale Research.
34: 278
Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. Chatto and Windus.
244-5
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
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's Susan unpublished), and booksellers at Wrexham and Liverpool were mentioned...
Textual Production
Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS
edited a volume of selections from Jane Austen, for which she wrote an introduction.
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
Joan Aiken
Next year came The Smile of the Stranger, a historical romance whose English heroine experiences not only the French Revolution (since she has been living with her father in France) but other markers...
Textual Production
Rose Tremain
RT
published a novel entitled Music and Silence, which she dedicated to her daughter, Eleanor.
Scholar John Mullan
has related the title to others employing two abstract nouns, like Elizabeth Inchbald
's Nature and...
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
Eliza Parsons
EP
's second gothic novel, The Mysterious Warning, A German Tale (another favourite of Austen
's Isabella Thorpe), appeared, with a frontispiece and dedication to the new Princess of Wales.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 687-8
Textual Production
Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS
's earliest works, which emerged from a romantic sense of beauty, defined her for decades of readers. In the first phase of her writing career, from 1900 to about 1915, she sought the delicate...
Textual Production
Melesina Trench
Because a grand-daughter (Mary-Melusina, daughter of Richard Chenevix Trench) married a son of James Edward Austen-Leigh
(first biographer of his aunt Jane Austen
), MT
's papers are now housed with the Austen-Leigh papers at...
Textual Production
Naomi Alderman
In another article of similar date (early 2017), Alderman praises an early love, the webcomic, formerly the comic strip. Her favourites include as Kate Beaton
's webcomic Hark a Vagrant, which often, as in...
