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.
Next year saw a rich crop of reviews. Sydney Smith
in the Edinburgh Review, while praising HM
's style and her skill at manipulating her readers, damned the novel as over-moralized, strained and unnatural...
Literary responses
Emily Eden
The Athenæum reported: A brighter book of travel we have not seen for many a day. It likened EE
's style to that of Lucie Duff Gordon
and her wit, satire, and suggestion to those...
Literary responses
Alice Meynell
Virginia Woolf
was angered by AM
's opinion that Jane Austen
was a frump (and was even angrier that Meynell advised reading Sterne
's Tristram Shandy in an expurgated edition).
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
2: 503
Literary responses
Georgette Heyer
Joanna Cannan
(a friend of GH
) based a character on her in No Walls of Jasper (1930) who is described in Heyeresque style. She is not beautiful, not pretty; her nose was too large...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
The novel was a massive success, in the words of Henry Jamesa momentous public event.
Ward, Mary Augusta. “Introduction”. Robert Elsmere, edited by Rosemary Ashton, Oxford University Press, p. vii - xviii.
vii
Critic John Sutherland deems it the best-selling work of quality fiction in the nineteenth century. By the summer...
Literary responses
Susan Ferrier
This novel too was a success, if not quite so resoundingly as Marriage (to whose reputation more than one reviewer referred).
Cullinan, Mary. Susan Ferrier. Twayne.
68-9
The author's sister Helen (Mrs Kinloch
), an early reader, approached it...
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, pp. 303-31.
315
EHY
received a number of letters begging for this story (in itself a sequel) to...
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
Barbara Pym
BP
's father wrote to her on 3 May 1950 commending this novel, which he had not expected to enjoy since he preferred mysteries.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press.
157n12
Robert Liddell
, who had been familiar with it throughout...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jenkins
The novel was criticised by some for its exclusively upper-middle-class reach—a view which was energetically countered by Rose Macaulay
on a radio programme.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson.
107
The Times Literary Supplement welcomed with joy a novel where the...
Literary responses
Regina Maria Roche
The Critical Review was reminded unpleasantly of Ann Radcliffe
(from whom, indeed, says Rictor Norton
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, passages are lifted without acknowledgement).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The Critical summed up this novel as...
Literary responses
Mary Brunton
Brunton's English publisher, Longman
, registered in the year of publication that the book was in great demand and very much admired on the whole, though some complain of the later part of the work...
Literary responses
Catherine Hubback
Geraldine Jewsbury
's review praised the novel as among the best of a good crop that year, noting: The story is as quiet as one of Miss Austen
's, but the characters and incidents are...
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.
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
E. M. Delafield
Punch gave the novel a very positive review, which Heinemann
used in their advertising: An almost uncannily penetrating study of the development of a poseuse. Told with remarkable insight and a care that is both...
