Jane Austen

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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.
Photograph of a colourized print of Jane Austen, from a drawing by a Mr Andrews commissioned by Austen's nephew James Edward Austen Leigh as frontispiece to his "Memoir of Jane Austen", 1870 (fifty years after she died). She is shown seated, with a book on her lap, wearing a blue dress and light brown bonnet.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Anita Brookner
Critic John Bayley found AB on top of her form in this novel, spinning a plot line as strong as any of Jane Austen 's.
“Pages of pleasure”. Guardian Weekly, 1–7 Jan. 2004, pp. 12-13.
12
Literary responses Christina Rossetti
Gabriel anticipated critics when he described Commonplace as a prose tale . . . rather in the Austen vein.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Editors Doughty, Oswald and John Robert Wahl, Clarendon Press, 1965–1967, 4 vols.
2: 818
Contrasting Commonplace, and Other Short Stories with tawdry romance,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2223 (1870): 734
the...
Literary responses Rosa Nouchette Carey
The Athenæum was lavish with faint praise. It likened Only the Governess to a tranquil backwater out of the main current of the turbid stream of modern fiction.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3151 (1888): 337
Praising Carey for not...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
The sales of this second novel nearly doubled those of Pym's first: Excellent Women sold 5,477 copies in the two months to June 1952, while Some Tame Gazelle sold only 3,722 in the thirteen years...
Literary responses Harriett Mozley
A review in the Christian Remembrancer likened this novel to those of Jane Austen .
Mozley, Dorothea, editor. Newman Family Letters. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1962.
119
More than a century later Kathleen Tillotson agreed that it confirms HM 's place in the Austen tradition.
Tillotson, Kathleen et al. “Harriett Mozley”. Mid-Victorian Studies, Athlone Press, 1965, pp. 38-48.
46
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
The Athenæum compared this novel favourably to the work of Jane Austen , saying that HM outstripped her predecessor in creating characters of a higher order of mental force and spiritual attainment, and offering to...
Literary responses Frances Trollope
FT 's rambunctious widow was greatly admired by both her male and female readership. Even the Athenæum, which was usually unsupportive of her work, offered a positive review: [s]o frequently has it been our...
Literary responses Elizabeth Inchbald
A Simple Story was praised by no less a modern authority than Q. D. Leavis ,
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
(8 September 1989): 964
and received a more recent accolade from Terry Castle as the most elegant English fiction...
Literary responses Regina Maria Roche
The Critical Review was reminded unpleasantly of Ann Radcliffe (from whom, indeed, says Rictor Norton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, passages are lifted without acknowledgement).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The Critical summed up this novel as...
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Critics have felt that GH 's Regency novels mutated gradually from romance to comedy of manners. Of course no clear line can be drawn between the two. Some reviewers compared Heyer with Jane Austen because...
Literary responses Hannah Cowley
The Critical Review gave it a mixed and fairly unenthusiastic notice: it thought the play offered less pleasure to a reader than to an audience.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
55 (1783): 151
Jane Austen 's cousin Eliza de Feuillide
Literary responses Eleanor Sleath
The Critical Review observed crushingly that vapid and servile imitations like this one were a severe penance for critics who had been seduced by Ann Radcliffe into admiration for the modern romance.
qtd. in
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 761
Jane Austen
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Laski argued that the taste for popular fiction stemmed from the fact that the serious modern novel had decided to deny itself the amenity of the shapely story satisfactorily resolved, so that compulsive novel readers...
Literary responses Penelope Fitzgerald
This volume prompted A. S. Byatt to call its author Jane Austen 's nearest heir.
qtd. in
“Flamingo Press advertisement for ’The Means of Escape’ by Penelope Fitzgerald”. London Review of Books, 19 Oct. 2000, p. 21.
21
Literary responses Barbara Pym
In a negative review in the Sunday Times (headed The Loneliness of Miss Pym), Anita Brookner described Pym's tone and characterizations as coldly detached and reductive, and complained of a determined sexlessness of the...

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