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.
Austen
's Pride and Prejudice was released in the USA by MGM
as a Hollywood film, with screenplay by AH
and others.
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press, 1996.
357
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). http://www.imdb.com.
politics
Eleanor Rathbone
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, 8 July 2004, pp. 19-21.
21
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
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
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, 1992.
1-2, 9
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984, p. various pages.
xiii-xiv
Having achieved moderate success during her early career...
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
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
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
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
Aldous Huxley
Later that year he was hired again to adapt Jane Austen
's Pride and Prejudice for the big screen—though when England and Germany went to war he briefly tried to renege on the contract, feeling...
Publishing
Ethel Wilson
The book was produced in England but copies shipped to Canada bore a Canadian imprint.
Stouck, David. Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography. University of Toronto Press, 2003.
110
Publication was delayed for some time. Upon first receiving the manuscript in early 1945, EW
's editors at Macmillan
Publishing
Dervla Murphy
Thinking of her father's years of hoping and struggling to publish his novels, DM
said she felt her life had been chosen as the medium through which all the strivings of generations of scribbling Murphys...
Publishing
Flora Thompson
The Ladies Companion printed most of a winning competition entry by FT
(who was not yet an author), an essay required to capture in 300 words her understanding of Jane Austen
's success.
Lindsay, Gillian. Flora Thompson: The Story of the Lark Rise Writer. Hale, 1996.
