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.
Burney's family were delighted. Her young half-sister Sarah Harriet
(who was about to publish her own first novel) sent her a perfect rhapsody of praise.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
17-18
A long review in the Analytical Review, probably...
Reception
Mary Russell Mitford
Mitford was often comical about her own letters: on one occasion she likened them to those of Austen
's Mr Collins.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 291
Some may prefer the often astringent letters of her old age, when...
Reception
Eudora Welty
Like Austen
's Mansfield Park, Delta Wedding has been contradictorily read, some seeing its patriarchal estate as embodying utopia and some as dystopia. Reviewer Claudia Roth Pierpont
argued in The New Yorker that Welty...
Reception
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has been filmed repeatedly for both television and the cinema, as well as being made the subject of musicals, plays, and a ballet performed by the London Children's Ballet
in 1997 and 2008...
Reception
Flora Macdonald Mayor
The novel established FMM
's reputation for precise use of prose,
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
60741 (4 October 1980): 8
received good reviews, and very nearly won the Polignac Prize.
Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists, Macmillan.
45
FMM
was judged sensitive yet detached, firm and...
Reception
Penelope Fitzgerald
PF
is on record as saying of her two genres of choice: I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often...
Reception
Charlotte Smith
Jane Austen
transcribed a poem, Kalendar of Flora, from Minor Morals, perhaps in summer 1808 for her sister Cassandra.
Le Faye, Deirdre. A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family. Cambridge University Press.
Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “’She must be a very good novelist’: Rereading E. H. Young (1880-1949)”. English Studies in Canada, Vol.
27
, No. 3, pp. 303-31.
324
Reception
Jane West
JW
was well-known as a productive writer who nevertheless put out a great deal of domestic labour. Jane Austen
, marvelling at her sister's time management skills, remarked: how good Mrs. West cd [sic] have...
Reception
Mary Hays
One of Jane Austen
's sisters-in-law owned a copy. Some reviewers objected both to content and arrangement. The European Review was not untypical in that although it expressed some admiration it also called for a...
Reception
Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson
, centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Reception
Jennifer Johnston
Critic Imhof Rüdiger
attacked JJ
(then the author of seven published novels) in 1985, arguing that she urgently needed to find new themes, and that her work was being compromised through self-repetition.
Imhof, Rüdiger. “’A Little Bit of Ivory, Two Inches Wide’: The Small World of Jennifer Johnston’s Fiction”. Etudes Irlandaises, Vol.
10
, pp. 129-44.
Johnston classifies reviewers...
Publishing
Anne-Thérèse de Lambert
The collection was published as The Works of the Marchioness de Lambert in London in 1749 with Thomas Carte
named as translator of the advice-letters but not of the rest. Further editions or re-issues appeared...
Publishing
Frances Burney
FB
had worked on the story told in this novel since before her marriage. The heroine had been called variously Betulia, Arietta, and Clarinda.
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge University Press.
Early in her conception of this project, Grant invoked the Spirit or the Muse of Biography: on what calm elevation dost thou reside, surrounded by the powers of just discrimination, candid discussion, and true delineation...
