Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Frances Jacson
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Standard Name: Jacson, Frances
Birth Name: Frances Margaretta Jacson
Pseudonym: The Author of Plain Sense
Pseudonym: A Person without a Name
Pseudonym: The Author of Rhoda
FJ
is now accepted as the author of five late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels, published anonymously or with allusion to former titles in the chain, which were formerly attributed to Alethea Lewis
. She kept a diary throughout her middle and old age, and also published a single religious work. Her fiction, though it remains reliant on well-tried plot devices, is notable for its perceptive exploration of her heroines' minds. She shows a strong vein of satire, and freely presents bad parents and bad marriages.
In the year that her sister Frances
published her second novel, Maria Jacson
issued her first, anonymous scientific text: Botanical Dialogues, Between Hortensia and Her Four Children, Charles, Harriet, Juliette and Henry.
Using her initials, M. E. J., as well as authoress of Botanical Dialogues, Maria Jacson
, sister of novelist Frances Jacson
, issued her third book, Sketches of the Physiology of Vegetable Life...
Family and Intimate relationships
Maria Elizabetha Jacson
Anne, the eldest of the three sisters, married into a family named Atherton. Frances Margaretta
, born the year before Maria, lived until 1842. Frances, who like Maria did not marry, shared a household with...
Author summary
Alethea Lewis
At first anonymously and then as Eugenia de Acton, AL
published six books (five novels and one book of essays), which are linked by their title-pages regardless of the nom de plume. A separate...
Literary responses
Alethea Lewis
Joan Percy
bolsters her argument against AL
's authorship of the novels now attributed to Frances Jacson
by quoting some of the most stilted remarks from this one—Unhand me this instant and let me...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Maria Mackenzie
The 1809 title-page quotes Shakespeare
's The Merchant of Venice. In 1811 this place is taken by lines from Henry VI Part III, in which the future Richard III avows his villainy and...