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.
Unfortunately as published it contains almost no dates. In the early pages DW
writes a deliberately commonplace style, but often records glimpses of people or overheard conversations for possible use in fiction. She relates the...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. S. Byatt
Here the first-person male narrator, a tiny dwarf-like man named Phineas Gilbert Nanson, on impulse abandons his work towards a PhD in English (Byatt skewers a gallery of predictably eccentric and pretentious academics), rejecting poststructural...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Strutt
Influence of Frances Burney
's Evelina is perceptible here, and influence of Jane Austen
seems at least a possibility: a family estate is named Maple Grove, as in Emma, and the heroine's marriage to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The novel is richly intertextual. Jane Austen
is a source of inspiration: Flora's sole occupational goal for the next thirty years is to collect material for a novel as good as Persuasion, but with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Lively
As controversy has been Henry's domain, reading has been Charlotte's. For ever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. Reading has taught her how sex...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
Imagery of postpartum fluidity, particularly lactation, characterizes the lovers' growing passion and the descriptions of female sexual desire and orgasm. The narrative alternates between a schizoid third-person dialogue
Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Penguin.
130
and first-person narration as Jane attempts...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The film shows the play being auctioned, and bought by an Off-Broadway group who produce it in Absurdist style. While they work at it, period motifs in the plot (notably the abduction of Harriet Byron)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Viola Meynell
VM
moves away from theological influence here, as her prose becomes dispassionate and satiric. This novel lacks plot interest; its strength lies in its emotional texture. In a manner that has been likened to Jane Austen
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
Again the protagonist, Kitty Maule, has a mixed national heritage: French/Russian and English. Again she is emotionally impoverished though academically successful; again she falls in love with a charismatic and unattainable man, Maurice Bishop. His...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
Her narratives of these emotional involvements lead her into analysis of the different effects of love on the two sexes. This analysis is founded on two women writers (identifiable although she does not name them)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
Her contributions include Jane in Space, a science fiction story written in the style of Jane Austen
.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
213
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Lively
Some stories are neatly turned but may seem a little perfunctory, like Abroad, about entitled young people, or Mrs Bennet after Austen
's character, about the continuing pressure for girls to marry or for...
Intertextuality and Influence
Barbara Pym
The central characters here are Jane Cleveland, a kindly and somewhat fey Oxford
don, and Prudence Bates, Jane's former student and surrogate daughter. Jane's main preoccupation is matchmaking for Prudence: she likens herself not only...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Atwood
The world before is a slightly exaggerated and unmercifully satirised version of today's reality: gated communities, vertiginous inequalities, frequently mutating viruses, sadistic pornography online, and commodification of everything. True to Atwood's principles, she finds the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Kennedy
MK
found the inspiration for this novel in Jane Austen
's satire of gothic melodrama, Northanger Abbey. The tragic melodrama of this novel's love stories, however, brings it closer to the actual gothic tradition...
