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.
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
Literary responses Diana Athill
Through her great age and greater panache DA became something of a cult figure. Edward Field wrote that she functioned for the British public as the Chief Guide to Old Age.
Field, Edward. “Edward Field’s Introduction”. Letters to a Friend, 2012, p. xi - xx.
xx
She was awarded...
Literary responses Frances Jacson
The Critical Review did this novel proud, first listing it, then praising it warmly for its superior moral tendency.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
4th ser. 1 (1812): 668
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
4th ser. 6 (1814): 688
Sarah, Lady Davy , told Sarah Ponsonby
Literary responses Eliza Lynn Linton
Geraldine Jewsbury , reviewing this novel for the Athenæum, was none too complimentary. She thought the author had offered an ineffective sermon on this excellent moral: clever, as anything she writes is likely to...
Literary responses Catherine Gore
The year after these two novels appeared, a writer in The New Spirit of the Age measured CG unflatteringly against the humour of Frances Burney or the lifelike precision of Jane Austen , but credited...
Literary responses Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland thinks that this is the most challenging of LCB 's novels because of the complex interrelationship, in Delamere, between aristocratic pastimes, the arts, and the Whig aristocracy. He sees the amateur theatricals as...
Literary responses Ann Radcliffe
AR 's rival M. G. Lewis finished reading Udolpho within ten days of its publication, though he had during the same time travelled from England to the Hague.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
93
In 1825 Ann Lister eagerly traced...
Literary responses Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
Meanwhile the vogue for The Wild Irish Girl was immense: Dublin ladies were wearing scarlet cloaks and golden bodkins, as Glorvina and as Owenson did.
Campbell, Mary, 1917 - 2002. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora, 1988.
71-2
She became (and remained more or less all her...
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 Isak Dinesen
When this, like ID 's first book, became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, she felt it would cheapen the recognition awarded the earlier work—showing that she misinterpreted this commercial honour as a purely critical one.
Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen. Penguin, 1984.
312
Literary responses Frances Jacson
Maria Edgeworth read this novel on its appearance (firmly preferring it to Jane Austen's Emma), and two years later mentioned it as the title defining FJ 's achievement.
Percy, Joan. “An Unrecognized Novelist: Frances Jacson (1754-1842)”. British Library Journal, Vol.
23
, No. 1, 1997, pp. 81-97.
96n5
Published almost simultaneously with Austen
Literary responses George Eliot
John Morley , anonymously in the Saturday Review, noted that [o]ne of the puzzles, which runs pathetically through Felix Holt as through Romola and the The Mill on the Floss, is the evil...
Literary responses Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
RPJ was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1976, the Neil Gunn International Fellowship in earlier 1979, a MacArthur Foundation Grant in 1983, and a CBE in 1998.
Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Macmillan, 1989.
242, 3
Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
25
Gates, Anita. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Screenwriter, Dies at 85”. The New York Times, 3 Apr. 2013.
She attracted less critical attention in...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen 's nephew James Austen-Leigh compared it to the work of Austen and Scott ...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
Critic Jenny Uglow argues that My Lady Ludlow is an important—an original and brave
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
468
book—although its experiment in creating a feminine fiction based on women's lives, carefully observed, is not entirely successful. In terms...
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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.