Jane Austen

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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.
Photograph of a colourized print of Jane Austen, from a drawing by a Mr Andrews commissioned by Austen's nephew James Edward Austen Leigh as frontispiece to his "Memoir of Jane Austen", 1870 (fifty years after she died). She is shown seated, with a book on her lap, wearing a blue dress and light brown bonnet.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Birth Catherine Hubback
Her parents were married at St Laurence, Ramsgate, Kent, on 24 July 1806.
“FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service”. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Her aunt Jane Austen had lived with her parents for some months early in their marriage, and later wrote verses to celebrate...
Family and Intimate relationships Catherine Hubback
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...
Dedications Catherine Hubback
CH had heard the Austen fragment read aloud in her youth, but did not have access to it as she wrote, which she did on a long visit to Wales. She dedicated her work...
Textual Features Catherine Hubback
The younger sister is Emma Watson, who has been educated away from home, and who on returning to her impoverished family finds herself out of sympathy with her elder sisters' quest to attract husbands. As...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Catherine Hubback
On the topic of Jane Austen 's first accepting, then rejecting, the proposal of Harris Bigg-Wither , CH wrote that the acceptance must have been given in a momentary fit of self-delusion, and that Jane...
Literary responses Catherine Hubback
Geraldine Jewsbury 's review praised the novel as among the best of a good crop that year, noting: The story is as quiet as one of Miss Austen 's, but the characters and incidents are...
Reception Catherine Hubback
One reviewer of this novel took the hint offered by CH 's frequent reference to her aunt, and pronounced that she was allied to Jane Austen by genius as well as by blood.
Sutherland, Kathryn. Jane Austen’s Textual Lives from Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford University Press, 2007.
270
Literary responses E. M. Hull
Patricia Raub views The Sheik as the precursor of the mass-marketed romances initiated by Harlequin Romance novels in 1957.
Raub, Patricia. “Issues of Passion and Power in E. M. Hulls The SheikWomens Studies, Vol.
21
, 1992, pp. 119-28.
123
The plot line which pits a young, beautiful, inexperienced, and aristocratic heroine against a tall...
Literary responses Violet Hunt
VH 's associate Rebecca West had strong praise for Their Lives. In a review in the Daily News on 7 March 1917, she called it a work of art. She found in it a...
Literary responses Rachel Hunter
The Critical Review offered its warm commendation on the volume.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
3rd ser. 1 (1804): 118
Jane Austen 's teasing response to The Spoiled Child in particular appears in her own twelve-year-old niece's proudly claiming that...
Literary responses Rachel Hunter
This novel was the second of RH 's to be affectionately mocked by Jane Austen . Austen sent her niece the future Anna Lefroy a letter purportedly for delivery to RH herself, in the formal...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Catherine Hutton
CH was reading Jane Austen : at this stage she saw Austen's novels as trifles, but agreeable ones.
Hutton, Catherine. Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century. Editor Beale, Catherine Hutton, Cornish Brothers, 1891.
175
Textual Features Catherine Hutton
CH had come seriously to admire Jane Austen : Her novels are pictures of common life, something like mine, but much more varied, and her character is either something like mine, or what I would...
Occupation Catherine Hutton
As well as collecting illustrations of costume, CH was an early collector of autographs. (She began both these collections at a young age, but presumably had to start again from scratch after her losses in...
Textual Features Catherine Hutton
Of particular value in CH 's letters are her comments on literature. She offered detailed views on (probably) Elizabeth Heyrick 's Exposition, a pamphlet about economics, admiring the language while doubting Heyrick's capacity to...

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