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.
Her other introductions to literary works include one to a paperback edition of Austen
's Mansfield Park in 1972.
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Alice Meynell
She often used this column to address the works of literary women of the past. She judged Jane Austen
inferior to Charlotte Brontë
, accepting Brontë's opinion that Austen lacked what she, by implication, possessed:...
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Michèle Roberts
In November 2011 MR
edited Wooing Mr Wickham, a collection of stories inspired by Jane Austen
or by Chawton House.
Roberts also selected the stories for this volume from those submitted to the...
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Charlotte Brontë
CB
's comments on Jane Austen
, whom she first read at this time, reflect her own literary priorities: She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously...
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Mary Stockdale
MS
(as Miss Stockdale) issued through her father
's firmThe Family Book; or, Children's Journal, translated from the French of Arnaud Berquin
, Interspers'd with Poetical Pieces written by the Translator...
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Angela Thirkell
She also provided introductions for editions of Jane Austen
's Persuasion, 1946, William Makepeace Thackeray
's The Newcomes, 1954, and Anthony Trollope
's Barchester Towers, 1958.
Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Harry N. Abrams.
108
Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Macmillan.
240
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Rebecca West
RW
produced several introductions to novels by other writers, including Jonathan Cape
's editions of Kathleen Coyle
's Liv (1929), Jane Austen
's Northanger Abbey (1932), and Sarah Orne Jewett
's The Only Rose and Other Tales (1937).
West, Rebecca. “Bibliography”. Rebecca West: A Celebration, edited by Samuel Hynes, Viking Press, pp. 761-6.
PDJ
published a historical detective novel she said she wrote for fun and in order to combine two great enthusiasms (detection and Jane Austen
): Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
Crown, Sarah. “A life in writing: PD James”. Guardian.co.uk.
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P. D. James
PDJ
gave the annual lecture to the Jane Austen Society
at Chawton House in Hampshire (where Austen
was a regular visitor); it was entitled Emma Considered as a Detective Story.
James, P. D. Time to Be in Earnest. Faber and Faber.
little book of criticism titled Jane Austen
, 1775-1817 for the British Book News series Writers and Their Work.
Staley, Thomas F., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 34. Gale Research.
34: 278
Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. Chatto and Windus.
244-5
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Catherine Hubback
CH
published her first book, a novel entitled The Younger Sister, which recapitulates and completes her aunt Jane Austen
's unfinished, unpublished early novel The Watsons.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
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Rose Tremain
RT
published a novel entitled Music and Silence, which she dedicated to her daughter, Eleanor.
Scholar John Mullan
has related the title to others employing two abstract nouns, like Elizabeth Inchbald
's Nature and...
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Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS
published a largely epistolary novel which is designed as a companion piece to Jane Austen
's Emma. Entitled Jane Fairfax: A New Novel, it is written in a pastiche of early-nineteenth-century style.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
