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.
The central character is the undowered girl Florence Leslie—so called because of her birth in Italy—whose high-minded principles have been fuelled by indiscriminate
Aguilar, Grace. Woman’s Friendship. D. Appleton and Company.
13
reading in history, poetry, and romance at an early age...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
PDJ
followed the English tradition of detective-story writing that has continued from the 1920s and 1930s, a genre in which many women have held dominant positions. She spoke of her adolescent reading as influenced in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS
opens her story with Jane Fairfax as a little orphan growing up in the family of Colonel and Mrs Campbell, whose naughty daughter Euphrasia is a likable foil to her throughout. She ends it...
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
Cassandra Cooke
The Critical Review offered a plot-summary of Battleridge and said that the grasp of seventeenth-century manners was good, but the work is not very amusing; and, in point of composition, it is despicable.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
1: 778
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Her topic here is the social complications that arise when a wife, unusually, has her own independent income.
Vargo, Lisa. “<span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Lodore</span> and the ’Novel of Society’”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
6
, No. 3, pp. 425-40.
435
CG
's preface calls this a Novel of the simplest kind, addressed by a woman to...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
As the work opens, Cordelia, slight of body, determined of will, savvy of mind
Gidez, Richard. P. D. James. Twayne.
56
(who is to reappear later in another book, The Skull Beneath the Skin), is running a seedy detective agency...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Eleanor Trollope
It begins by relaying the story of Augustus Cheffington, whose marriage below his rank to Susan Dobbs is blamed for his inability to secure himself the respect of proper society or a position in the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
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
Elizabeth Taylor
As a child Betty Coles (later ET
) wrote plays (with very short scenes each demanding a new and elaborate setting) and stories. She said she always wanted to be a novelist.
Leclercq, Florence. Elizabeth Taylor. Twayne.
2
At twelve...
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
Ann Radcliffe
This novel marks AR
's first big success. It drew widespread critical acclaim.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
83
The Critical Review praised it and likened the author to Clara Reeve
(while making an issue of the fact that, though...
