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 series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
Textual Features
Margaret Drabble
Speaking at a Jane Austen
conference in 1993, MD
said that in this book she was doing something entirely new for her, in moving into, or close to, the occult.
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...
Textual Features
Anne Stevenson
In the title-poem, each of five stanzas ends with a version of the first closing lines: we thought we were living now, / but we were living then.
Stevenson, Anne. Selected Poems, 1956-1986. Oxford University Press.
128
These we, it seems, are...
Textual Features
Sara Jeannette Duncan
The Imperialist features a double-stranded plot focusing on a Canadian brother and sister. Lorne Murchison pursues a connection with Britain through formal trade agreements while Advena Murchison unites the countries with bonds of affection when...
Textual Features
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
wrote frequently on lesser-known female writers. The collected essays in From an Island include, in addition to the piece on Austen
, one on Heroines and Their Grandmothers which contrasts the cheerful heroines of...
The book reflects the Leavis's lofty tone about that large majority of authors who fail to measure up to the best. Jane Austen
was not given a section—because, F. R. Leavis insisted, she was too...
Textual Features
Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS
later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
Residence
E. M. Delafield
Virginia Woolf
did, however, visit EMD
, and wrote to her niece in November 1935 that Delafield lives in an old house like a character in Jane Austen
; whom she adores. But she has...
Residence
Mary Russell Mitford
The first period of poverty after his marriage caused him to move his family from Alresford in Hampshire. (MRM
later remembered the Hampshire countryside with warm affection, and delighted in its nearness to...
Residence
Anne Mozley
The garden, though not the house, was liable to flooding by the River Trent. John Wordsworth observed that the conversation at Barrow was as good as anything in Miss Austen
's novels.
Wordsworth, John, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, p. xii - xx.
xviii
Elizabeth...
Residence
Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS
saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens
and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown.
103
she...
Residence
Mary Anne Barker
MAB
and her husband, Frederick Broome
, called their cottage at the sheep station, from their own name, Broomielaw. It stood in the Malvern Hills on the banks of the Selwyn River, attached...
