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.
Nearly seventy, ER
volunteered for war work herself, and despatched her car (which she called Jane Austen after the novelist and the Austin
make of car) for active service.
Johnson, Richard William. “Associated Prigs”. London Review of Books, pp. 19-21.
21
Author summary
Sarah Green
Besides a conduct book, a translation, and a pamphlet, SG
wrote most fictional forms available to her: novels in several modes, stories, romances, and most notably mock-romances. She was one of the ten most prolific...
Author summary
Stella Gibbons
SG
was a gifted comic writer whose lively, parodic first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, was such a success that it has tended to eclipse her later achievements. Much of her writing was inspired by...
Author summary
Eleanor Sleath
ES
was a popular novelist who published six titles, mostly with the Minerva Press
, in little more than a decade, having begun just before the close of the eighteenth century. She sometimes intersperses poetry...
Author summary
Emma Tennant
ET
wrote and published in many genres between 1973 and the second decade of the twenty-first century, and often blended one genre with another.
At first a novelist (who later became a specialist in the...
Author summary
Catherine Hubback
CH
, a niece of Jane Austen
, began her publishing career in the mid nineteenth century with her completed version of a novel left unfinished by her famous aunt, of whom she also wrote...
Author summary
Barbara Pym
BP
was a distinguished, understatedly comic novelist of the twentieth century, whose autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, and notebooks) were published only after her death.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press.
1-2, 9
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, p. various pages.
xiii-xiv
Having achieved moderate success during her early career...
Author summary
E. M. Delafield
EMD
's charming, witty novels are characterized by acute observation and good-humoured social satire. Her stories often draw from her own experiences—as an Edwardian débutante, a novice in a religious order, a war worker, and...
Author summary
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Writing mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, SKS
published thirty-one novels, in addition to about twenty works in other genres: biography, criticism, saints' lives, country lore, and books of memoirs (one of...
Author summary
Joan Aiken
JA
was a popular and successful later twentieth-century writer of short stories and longer fictions for children, most of which are fantasies or have strong supernatural or mystery elements. She also wrote adult novels (both...
Publishing
Frances Burney
FB
had worked on the story told in this novel since before her marriage. The heroine had been called variously Betulia, Arietta, and Clarinda.
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge University Press.
Early in her conception of this project, Grant invoked the Spirit or the Muse of Biography: on what calm elevation dost thou reside, surrounded by the powers of just discrimination, candid discussion, and true delineation...
Publishing
Maria Jane Jewsbury
The Athenæum published MJJ
's essay on the literary career of Jane Austen
, thought to be the first substantial, formal, printed comment on her work by a woman.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Hidden Rill: The Life and Career of Maria Jane Jewsbury, II”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
67
, No. 1, The Library, pp. 450-73.
465
Publishing
Maria Jane Jewsbury
Henry Austen
, the source of many of MJJ
's opinions about his sister
, recycled parts of this piece for Bentley
's new edition of Austen
's novels in 1833. (He omitted MJJ
's...
Publishing
George Eliot
In submitting this anonymous manuscript to Blackwood
, Lewes
invoked the names of Oliver Goldsmith
(author of The Vicar of Wakefield) and of Jane Austen
. The firm of Blackwood
turned out to be...
