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 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 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 Hannah More
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 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 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 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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
2: 503
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 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 E. M. Hull
Patricia Raub views The Sheik as the precursor of the mass-marketed romances initiated by Harlequin Romance novels in 1957.
Raub, Patricia. “Issues of Passion and Power in E. M. Hulls The SheikWomens Studies, Vol.
21
, 1992, pp. 119-28.
123
The plot line which pits a young, beautiful, inexperienced, and aristocratic heroine against a tall...
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...

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