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.
As early as 1824 MRM
was asking the advice of friends as to whether they thought she could be a novelist.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 29
She added one of her frequent disclaimers: I write merely for remuneration...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
Kennedy once again found her inspiration for this novel in the model of Jane Austen
. For Troy Chimneys, she extracted parts of the letters which Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra
.
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann.
187
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriett Mozley
Her letters, on the evidence of those included in Dorothea Mozley
's Newman Family Letters (published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
in 1962), are highly intelligent and entertaining. As a girl she rattles...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes and very slightly alters four lines from Pope
beginning What gay ideas crowd the vacant brain,
Gore, Catherine. Mothers and Daughters. Bentley.
title-page
but whereas Pope's imaginary Teresa Blount
was daydreaming idly and innocently of the dukes and...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
Commander Adam Dalgliesh does his detecting this time in the claustrophobic confines of a theological college, in one of [James's] favourite places—the isolated, beautiful, but desolate Suffolk coast.
Ashby, Melanie. “P. D. James Talks to Melanie Ashby”. Mslexia, Vol.
14
, pp. 39-40.
39
Despite the old-fashioned setting, the plot...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
Writing to Mary Russell Mitford
of her hope that they might meet, HM
acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me.
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett.
This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen
of a great German contemporary of Austen:...
Intertextuality and Influence
U. A. Fanthorpe
With this volume, says UAF
, I entered the different world of S. Martin's, Lancaster, and of France; and I was just beginning to have things to say about the condition of women...
Intertextuality and Influence
Antonia Fraser
Fraser quotes here from Eliot
's tribute in Middlemarch to the silent influence of those who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. Methuen.
xiii
She opens the book proper with a submerged...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes the passage in Swift
's Gulliver's Travels where the King of Brobdingnag hears from Gulliver about English politics and marvels that human grandeur can be mimicked by such contemptible insects.
Gore, Catherine. The Hamiltons; or, Official Life in 1830. R. Bentley.
title-page
The...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. B. C. Jones
The book positions itself in relation to cultural, social and emotional markers that are not those of a majority in later times. Helen and Felicia read Northanger Abbey aloud, and Helen admits it to be...
Intertextuality and Influence
Samuel Richardson
Innumerable women novelists later conducted a dialogue (some admiring, some rebutting or revising) with SR
. Few could ignore his influence completely. Frances Brooke
wrote his biography; Anna Letitia Barbauld
edited his letters, and Jane Austen
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Brooke
She thought it had been too long, with too little plot, and that the subscription method had not been to its benefit. Critic Juliet McMaster
believes that Jane Austen
had Emily Montague in mind in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
Like most of AS
's work, this novel is playfully self-reflexive in its adherence to typical story structure. In a formulaic breakdown of essential narrative parts, The Accidental has a prescribed Beginning, Middle...
Intertextuality and Influence
Angela Carter
The opening parodies that of Austen
's Emma.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
207
The novel is both gothic and parody gothic, and uses science fiction as a vehicle for the discussion of ideas. The story is told from...
