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.
One of GBS
's close friends was Sheila Kaye-Smith
, with whom she collaborated in works about Jane Austen
. Another was Noël Coward
, who met her after sending her a fan letter, introduced...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
G. B. Stern
She interprets the idea broadly, writing, for instance, of her love of Jane Austen
and of her experience in Hollywood. The volume establishes her shameless habit of repeating herself from one book of reminiscence...
Textual Production
Christina Stead
In 1972 CS
spent three painful months over a commission to review Quentin Bell
's life of Virginia Woolf
. She found many aspects and supposed aspects of Woolf repugnant: her alleged lack of appreciation...
Reception
Freya Stark
Recommended by the Book Society
and the Book Guild
, The Southern Gates of Arabia also received high praise in the Daily Telegraph, among other papers. FS
, rather surprisingly, was compared to Jane Austen
Friends, Associates
Germaine de Staël
In Regency England GS
met Coleridge
, Southey
, and Byron
. Jane Austen
, however, made a point of avoiding her.
Winegarten, Renee. Mme de Staël. Berg.
74, 76
Reception
Germaine de Staël
Benjamin Constant
, formerly the lover of GS
, represented her in his novel Adolphe as a woman whose mind was the most wide-ranging of any woman ever, and perhaps of any man,
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, pp. 12-35.
26
and...
Textual Features
Muriel Spark
Spark's introduction speculates about the neglect of Mary Shelley, suggests as possible cause the fact that no single, facile cliché can encapsulate her, and puts forward a witty and trenchant list of the clichés to...
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
Spark's first Brontë project was a group biography of the whole family, including the parents. In June 1949 she felt like a pregnant tigress with this work. It was to be published by Lindsay Drummond
Leisure and Society
Edith Somerville
In her later years ES
set out to extend her reading. She tried Woolf
's A Room of One's Own (at the behest of Ethel Smyth
) and admired it. But she could not like...
Textual Production
Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS
has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
The young Jane Austen
paid Emmeline the compliment of allusion in her comical History of England, 1791.Anna Seward
, on the other hand, condemned CS
for indelicacy because she had exposed her husband's...
Literary responses
Charlotte Smith
CS
's biographer Loraine Fletcher feels that in her Catherine the young Jane Austen
uses Ethelindeas a touchstone of literary intelligence for her characters.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
121
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering.
7: 188
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
120-1
Reception
Charlotte Smith
Jane Austen
transcribed a poem, Kalendar of Flora, from Minor Morals, perhaps in summer 1808 for her sister Cassandra.
Le Faye, Deirdre. A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family. Cambridge University Press.
204, 351
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
CS
's biographer Loraine Fletcher
gives a whole chapter to Austen
's response to her work.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
303-17
Intertextuality and Influence
Dodie Smith
The book is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cassandra, a budding writer. As she explains, I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how...
