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.
This, like Good Behaviour, is a black comedy set in a crumbling Anglo-Irishbig house, Durraghglass. Unlike Good Behaviour it sets its protagonist family (of the same generation as Aroon St Charles) in...
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 449
) had suggested as title Isadora; or, The Force of First Love.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 449
This novel too was attributed to Mrs Ross, perhaps because of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Beatrix Potter
BP
was not content with her success as a children's writer, but hankered to establish herself as an author for adults. Her references in her private writings to Burney
(a propos of her first appearance...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Harriet Burney
Lorna J. Clark, editor of SHB
's letters, notes the abundant portrayal in her novels of dysfunctional families.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
The title-page quotes from Shakespeare
(What's past is Prologue) and Cicero
(That cannot be said too often which is not yet understood).
Moore, Edith Mary. The Defeat of Woman. C.W. Daniel Co.
prelims
The chapters run from Women and the Struggle...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
CS
's biographer Loraine Fletcher
gives a whole chapter to Austen
's response to her work.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
303-17
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Ham
The story opens with the young Englishwoman Rhoda Ford (the unbeautiful one of two sisters) and her family in the west of Ireland, where her father has an entrepreneurial scheme. They try to come...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Oliphant
This novel is narrated in a consistently controlled sardonic tone.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
5
Lucilla Marjoribanks keeps house for her father, and employs on Carlingford society the skills she has learned in studying political economy at school. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
MAK
published, anonymously, her first, part-epistolary, religious novel, The Favourite of Nature: A Tale, which reflects the influence of her admired Jane Austen
.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 521
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The plot opens when the young, urban, highly civilised, bossy London heroine, Flora Poste, decides (when her parents die leaving her an unexpectedly small income) to live off her exaggeratedly rustic Sussex relations. (Flora admires...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hannah More
Harriet Corp
also responded, in 1817, with Coelebs Deceived, which opens with respectful critical dialogue about More's novel; but Corp's middle-aged protagonist finally decides to stay single. Mary Waldron
suggests that Jane Austen
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dodie Smith
The book is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cassandra, a budding writer. As she explains, I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Before beginning this novel she asked the advice of her stepson Martin Amis
to help her choose between this and a present-day version of Austen
's Sense and Sensibility. He opted unhesitatingly for the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Lavin
Another early work was Jane Austen
and the Construction of the Novel, Lavin's MA thesis.
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Augusta Ward
The heroine is described as deriving from a long line of English gentry, Whig supporters of the Empire: a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English...
