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.
In Recollections of a Scottish Novelist, LW
records her early love of literature. The books she read as a child, especially at the age of seven—including Charlotte Yonge
's The Little Duke, works...
Textual Production
Eglinton Wallace
It appeared in two different editions put out this year through the different publishers T. Hookham
, and Debrett
. The Debrett edition lists the price, one shilling and sixpence, on the title-page.
“Eighteenth Century Collections Online”. Gale Databases.
Goethe's novel...
Textual Production
Michelene Wandor
MW
has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen
, Charlotte Brontë
, George Eliot
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Augusta Ward
Perhaps the most interesting is her review (March 1884) of Harry Buxton Forman
's recent edition of Keats
. Ward argues that the letters to Fanny Brawne
ought not to have been made public. (She...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
The novel was a massive success, in the words of Henry Jamesa momentous public event.
Ward, Mary Augusta. “Introduction”. Robert Elsmere, edited by Rosemary Ashton, Oxford University Press, p. vii - xviii.
vii
Critic John Sutherland deems it the best-selling work of quality fiction in the nineteenth century. By the summer...
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...
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
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
SW
wrote her foreword to Dancing with Mr Darcy. Stories Inspired by Jane Austen
and Chawton House Library, selected in a competition which she had also judged, and published this year.
Waters, Sarah. “Foreword”. Dancing with Mr Darcy, Honno, pp. 1-4.
4
Education
Harriet Shaw Weaver
HSW
's family encouraged her in the regular pursuits of a young, middle-class Victorian woman. From her father she inherited an enthusiasm for poetry—she especially liked Shakespeare
, Coleridge
, and Whitman
—and she read...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Augusta Webster
She omits reviews from this collection, but provides readers with an opportunity to consider literary topics. The Translation of Poetry argues that because [i]n poetry the form of the thought is part of the thought...
Textual Production
Fay Weldon
FW
's five-part dramatisation of Jane Austen
's Pride and Prejudice was screened.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research.
14: 752
Textual Production
Fay Weldon
FW
published Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen, a book whose contents are what its title suggests.
Faulks, Lana. Fay Weldon. Twayne.
71
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Fay Weldon
Fiction-writer Aunt Fay writes letters to her eighteen-year-old niece, Alice, a student of literature at college, in defence of Austen
's novels, which Alice finds boring and irrelevant. The letters give precise descriptions of social...
Textual Production
Fay Weldon
In 2003 FW
contributed a foreword to a new edition of Austen
's juvenile Love and Freindship (which, unusually, corrects the title to Love and Friendship).
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.
Textual Features
Eudora Welty
The word regional, said Welty, is careless, condescending, and an outsider's term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing.Jane Austen
, theBrontësisters
, and the writers...
