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.
Once she became a writer herself, CH
drew some capital from her relationship to her famous aunt, Jane Austen
, who died the year before she was born. Tradition later said that as a little...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sarah, Lady Pennington
Her father, John Moore
, was an apothecary practising in the fashionable resort of Bath in Somerset, who seems to have become rich in his practice. His name and place of residence appears on...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eliza Kirkham Mathews
The pair had met that summer. At four years the younger, he was just twenty-one.
Mathews, Anne Jackson. Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian. R. Bentley.
1: 198
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Charles Mathews
In the account of the marriage given by Mathews's second wife
(who does not sound...
Family and Intimate relationships
Beatrix Potter
The day after receiving this letter, BP
re-read the end part of Jane Austen
's Persuasion. I thought my story had come right with patience & waiting like Anne Eliott [sic]'s did.
Grinstein, Alexander. The Remarkable Beatrix Potter. International Universities Press.
116
Family and Intimate relationships
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans (later GE
) accepted a proposal of marriage from a young artist, still unidentified, only to withdraw it when she apparently realised that her eager imagination had attributed to him attractions that...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Jane Howard
They had been living together for more than a year, and EJH
had already embarked on the difficult stepmother relationship with the three Amis children—especially the two boys, who were living with them, and were...
Family and Intimate relationships
Cassandra Cooke
CC
was a first cousin of her namesake Cassandra Leigh Austen
, and first cousin once removed, as well as godmother, of the latter's daughter Jane Austen
. The older and younger novelist were not...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Linskill
Mary Jane Linskill had two sisters and three brothers, besides, says Stamp, four other siblings who died very young. She was four years older than Elizabeth, the next to survive. Years later a baby named...
Family and Intimate relationships
Cassandra Cooke
Cassandra's cousin Jane Austen
criticised the household management of Samuel Cooke (who was her godfather), judging him a disagreable, fidgetty master to his servants.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
In his professional capacity he worried about competing with the Methodists
Oman, Carola. An Oxford Childhood. Hodder and Stoughton.
112
She supported...
Family and Intimate relationships
P. D. James
PDJ
named Jane after her favourite author, Jane Austen
. She was reading Austen in a London bomb shelter not long before her daughter was born, and bombs fell incessantly around Queen Charlotte's Hospital
after...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eliza Fletcher
She said she was wrapped up in her children. Though she never could command the patience that qualified me to be their teacher, I delighted in making them my happy and confidential companions.
Fletcher, Eliza. Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, of Edinburgh. Editor Mary, Lady Richardson, Printed at the offices of C. Thurman for private circulation.
76
They...
Education
Elizabeth Taylor
Her first school, where she went at the age of six, was a little private establishment called Leopold House, which gave a grounding in English and maths and team games.
Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books.
12-13
When Betty was eleven...
Education
Edna Lyall
Since the cousin with whom she shared lessons was three years older, Ada Ellen read a good many books at that time which must have been far beyond . . . [her] powers. At twelve...
