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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Eva Figes
Though she mentions such writers as Eliza Haywood and Mary Davys , she begins her detailed discussion with the 1790s (a time which twenty years on would be regarded as somewhat late in the history...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Augusta Webster
She omits reviews from this collection, but provides readers with an opportunity to consider literary topics. The Translation of Poetry argues that because [i]n poetry the form of the thought is part of the thought...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Brigid Brophy
Some items are reprinted from Don't Never Forget, including a piece on Jane Austen , fiercely condemnatory of her cult following (which BB finds demeaning and condescending), which concludes with unreserved praise: I think...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Marghanita Laski
She insists that even Jane Austen . . . could write letters of a bitchiness and coarseness not inferrable from the impeccable sense of human values in her books.
Laski, Marghanita. “To the Editor: ’George Eliot and Her World’”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 3725, 27 July 1973, p. 869.
869
She posits an underlying double...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Penelope Fitzgerald
It includes Fitzgerald's comments on works by Jane Austen , George Eliot , Margaret Oliphant , Barbara Pym , Carol Shields , and Amy Tan , as well as on a number of recent literary...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Catherine Hubback
On the topic of Jane Austen 's first accepting, then rejecting, the proposal of Harris Bigg-Wither , CH wrote that the acceptance must have been given in a momentary fit of self-delusion, and that Jane...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant's views on the status of women shifted somewhat with time. She dismissed the women's suffrage petition, and represented women who supported suffrage as unnatural. Answering Barbara Bodichon , she argued that marriage was...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susan Ferrier
SF 's letters deal mainly with day-to-day occurrences, but her literary opinons are always worth having. She comments on several works by Lady Charlotte Campbell (later Bury) . Reading Austen 's Emma in 1816 (the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The previously published essays include pieces on Austen and Landseer , and the early Toilers and Spinsters.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Bowen
She writes admiringly of Jane Austen , but far less so of George Eliot , whom she regards as over-intellectual.
Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
81-2
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Augusta Ward
Perhaps the most interesting is her review (March 1884) of Harry Buxton Forman 's recent edition of Keats . Ward argues that the letters to Fanny Brawne ought not to have been made public. (She...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text John Oliver Hobbes
JOH sometimes discusses her own writing, career, and ambition: One's place in literature is a possession—never a concession. And one knows one's place. I don't wish to be judged—one way or the other—till I am...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Grant
She likes her reading to be strenuous: she recommends Jane Austen 's Mansfield Park as light reading,
Grant, Anne. Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Editor Grant, John Peter, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844, 3 vols.
2: 68
and says she would be happy to give a whole summer to Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Muriel Jaeger
MJ 's next chapter deals with the male counterparts of the previous chapter's examples (Frederic Lamb , but also Dugald Stewart and Henry Brougham ), setting the Society for the Suppression of Vice against...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Lady Margaret Sackville
Austen , she says, was the first really modern novelist . . . more modern in a sense than Dickens or Thackeray .
Austen, Jane. “Introduction”. Jane Austen, edited by Lady Margaret Sackville, Herbert & Daniel, 1912, p. ix - xvi.
xi
This publication, together with the anthology, suggests that LMS was pursuing...

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