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 Eliza Nugent Bromley
Peterson has pointed out that this novel is probably as much a target in Austen 's Love and Freindship as is its predecessor. It received, however, very different reviews (the Analytical's probably written by...
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...
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
English reviewers, for instance in the Gentleman's Magazine, were ready with their praise.
Dow, Gillian. “The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writings for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
29
, No. 3, 2006, pp. 367-81.
374
Jane Austen implied in a letter of 1800 that the first volume of this work had left her mind stored...
Literary responses E. H. Young
V. S. Pritchett was moved by The Curate's Wife to liken EHY (as did many critics) to Austen .
Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “’She must be a very good novelist’: Rereading E. H. Young (1880-1949)”. English Studies in Canada, Vol.
27
, No. 3, Sept. 2001, pp. 303-31.
315
EHY received a number of letters begging for this story (in itself a sequel) to...
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...
Literary responses Georgiana Fullerton
Henry Fothergill Chorley , reviewing the novel for the Athenæum, found Grantley Manorhaunted by the intertextual spectre of Jane Austen 's Emma; he also drew parallels with Frances Burney 's Cecilia...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
Mary Russell Mitford wrote to BH , You are the mistress of our tears, as Miss Austen is of our smiles, and I think you have the advantage.
qtd. in
Butts, Dennis. Mistress of our Tears, A Literary and Bibliographical Study of Barbara Hofland. Scolar Press, 1992.
19
Apart from somewhat overvaluing Hofland, this...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
Like the first, this second reviewer (probably H. F. Chorley ) found Agnes Grey both less objectionable and less powerful than Wuthering Heights.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
217-9
Many reviews concentrated wholly or solely on Emily's novel. The...
Literary responses Violet Hunt
VH 's associate Rebecca West had strong praise for Their Lives. In a review in the Daily News on 7 March 1917, she called it a work of art. She found in it a...
Literary responses Sarah Harriet Burney
Charles Burney , too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
lxii
Jane Austen later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
SFG 's importance to the influential Mary Wollstonecraft can be gauged from the way that Wollstonecraft used and built on her writings, recommended them, measured others by their standard, and also did not hesitate to...
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Bowen , in her laudatory review, likened the icy sharpness of ICB 's dialogue to the sound of glass being swept up one of these London mornings after a blitz.
qtd. in
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
160
ICB received a...
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 Anne Mozley
George Eliot not only praised this review in a letter, but also instructed her publisher to send a copy of her next novel, The Mill on the Floss, to Bentley's expressly so that it...
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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.