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.
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's Susan unpublished), and booksellers at Wrexham and Liverpool were mentioned...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.
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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
Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF
sent to Anne Grant
are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...
Textual Production
E. M. Forster
EMF
published Abinger Harvest, a collection of essays which includes Notes on the English Character, several pieces on India, and criticism of particular writers, including Jane Austen
.
Burra, Peter. “Mr E. M. Forster Past & Present”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1781, p. 239.
239
Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean. A Bibliography of E. M. Forster. Clarendon.
47-8
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
QDL
was arranging her lectures and essays on Jane Austen
into book form. Despite interest from publishers and although QDL
continued to write regularly on Austen, the monograph was never completed.
MacKillop, Ian. F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. Allen Lane.
263, 339-40
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
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Joan Aiken
JA
published Mansfield Revisited, A Novel, a sequel to Austen
's Mansfield Park and a harbinger of escalation in fiction of this type.
“Joan Aiken”. Fantastic Fiction.
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
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
Margaret Drabble
MD
made her journalism debut early. In 1967 she wrote in the Guardian about the accomplishment of the sexual revolution brought about by the contraceptive pill. It was a major component of women's liberation, she...
Textual Production
Georgette Heyer
GH
's next Regency romance, Bath Tangle (set in a place whose very name evokes Jane Austen
), features another heroine who needs special permission to marry.
Hodge, Jane Aiken. The Private World of Georgette Heyer. Bodley Head.
