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
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. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Reception Eudora Welty
Like Austen 's Mansfield Park, Delta Wedding has been contradictorily read, some seeing its patriarchal estate as embodying utopia and some as dystopia. Reviewer Claudia Roth Pierpont argued in The New Yorker that Welty...
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...
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 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, 1977, pp. 761-6.
764-5
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...
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...
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...
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, 2003.
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...
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, 17 Oct. 2015.

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