Jane Austen

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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 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 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 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 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...
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 Emily Eden
Marghanita Laski , who acknowledged the enjoyment purveyed by EE 's relish of polished cynicism, also felt she could be enjoyed only so long as Jane Austen is quite forgotten.
qtd. in
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Gale Research, 1981–2025, Numerous volumes.
110
EE 's Indian writings...
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 Frances Burney
Evelina was an instantaneous success. While FB 's identity was still unknown she repeatedly listened to praise of herself, uttered in ignorance that she had any concern in it. Samuel Johnson (like friends of Swift
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 Elizabeth von Arnim
The Benefactress received positive reviews in the US and England. A number of critics likened the author to Jane Austen , while The Examiner referred to her as the Unknown Genius. The Daily Mail...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Henry James 's review in 1865 considered Braddon's success alongside that of Collins , pronouncing her the founder of the sensation novel (defined as devising domestic mysteries adapted to the wants of a sternly prosaic...
Literary responses Mary Augusta Ward
The novel was a massive success, in the words of Henry Jamesa momentous public event.
qtd. in
Ward, Mary Augusta. “Introduction”. Robert Elsmere, edited by Rosemary Ashton, Oxford University Press, 1987, 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 Angela Thirkell
The Times called this novel a suite instead of a symphony.
qtd. in
Strickland, Margot. Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. Duckworth, 1977.
127
Not for the first time AT was likened to Austen , but this time the likeness was held to lie in not mentioning...
Literary responses Mary Cholmondeley
None of these later novels achieved the success of Red Pottage. Critic Vineta Colby writes that MC 's last novels invited the neglect they received from critics and public alike, because of their extreme...

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