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.
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...
Anthologization
Eudora Welty
EW
's essay The Radiance of Jane Austen was reprinted in 2009 in Susannah Carson's A Truth Universally Acknowledged : 33 great writers on why we read Jane Austen.
Textual Features
Jane West
The Danbury ladies take an avid interest in the arrival at a nearby mansion of Mr Dudley and one of his two daughters, whose mother is dead. Again the contrasted heroines (this time sisters) follow...
Literary responses
Jane West
This work had the unusual distinction of earning approving comments from both Austen
and Wollstonecraft
. The contrasted sisters are generally seen as an important source for Austen
's Sense and Sensibility, and the...
Reception
Jane West
JW
was well-known as a productive writer who nevertheless put out a great deal of domestic labour. Jane Austen
, marvelling at her sister's time management skills, remarked: how good Mrs. West cd [sic] have...
Textual Production
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.
764-5
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Whipple
Unfortunately as published it contains almost no dates. In the early pages DW
writes a deliberately commonplace style, but often records glimpses of people or overheard conversations for possible use in fiction. She relates the...
Publishing
Ethel Wilson
The book was produced in England but copies shipped to Canada bore a Canadian imprint.
Stouck, David. Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography. University of Toronto Press.
110
Publication was delayed for some time. Upon first receiving the manuscript in early 1945, EW
's editors at Macmillan
Literary responses
Ethel Wilson
Negative reviews seemed to repeat Macmillan
's original worry that the collection was half-cooked. Aunt Topaz was characterized by the Canadian Forum as a terrible bore, whom the reviewer found almost as tiresome to...
Travel
Harriette Wilson
HW
's presence with her first lover, Lord Craven, at his family's estate of Ashdown Park in the Berkshire Downs was recorded in a letter by Jane Austen
, who wrote that Craven had...
Literary responses
Harriette Wilson
Admiration of HW
as a writer united historian Eric Hobsbawm
and editor Karl Miller
. Miller judged the memoirs a well-written serious work, as much a work of social history, a study of class and...
Reception
Mary Wollstonecraft
Katharine Marion Metcalfe
, a recent graduate at Oxford University
, did something extraordinary in enquiring of Professor Sir Walter Raleigh
whether materials existed for research on MW
. Raleigh proposed that Metcalfe should edit Jane Austen
instead.
Barchas, Janine. “The Lost Books of Austen Studies”. States of the Book. CSECS/SCEDHS annual conference.
Textual Features
Virginia Woolf
The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection.
McNeillie, Andrew, and Virginia Woolf. “Introduction”. The Common Reader, Annotated Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. ix - xv.
x
Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting...
Textual Features
Virginia Woolf
She writes more directly of money, of the riches lavished through the ages on masculine institutions like the ancient universities, but here too her clinching example is one of the imagination: her contrast of the...
death
Charlotte Yonge
She was buried at the foot of John Keble
's memorial cross in Otterbourne churchyard (despite a suggestion that she should be buried beside Jane Austen
in Winchester Cathedral).
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 18. Gale Research.
