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
Reception Sheila Kaye-Smith
Where her first two novels had been well reviewed, this one received not a single notice for three weeks (probably on account of its late-autumn publication date). SKS feared she was being passed over or...
Reception Mary Russell Mitford
Mitford was often comical about her own letters: on one occasion she likened them to those of Austen 's Mr Collins.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 291
Some may prefer the often astringent letters of her old age, when...
Reception Anita Brookner
This book provoked an unusual article from journalist Mark Lawson , centred less on Brookner than on his own response. I have mocked her dessicated sentences, characterless protagonists and action-free narratives, he wrote. The gist...
Reception Mary Wollstonecraft
Katharine Marion Metcalfe , a recent graduate at Oxford University , did something extraordinary in enquiring of Professor Sir Walter Raleigh whether materials existed for research on MW . Raleigh proposed that Metcalfe should edit Jane Austen instead.
Barchas, Janine. “The Lost Books of Austen Studies”. States of the Book. CSECS/SCEDHS annual conference, 17 Oct. 2015.
Reception Freya Stark
Recommended by the Book Society and the Book Guild , The Southern Gates of Arabia also received high praise in the Daily Telegraph, among other papers. FS , rather surprisingly, was compared to Jane Austen
Reception Barbara Pym
Pym was in great demand at this point in her career, giving print, radio, and television interviews, for example, and meeting with the writer of the first dissertation on her work.
Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye. Editors Holt, Hazel and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984.
304-5
She drew attention...
Reception Flora Macdonald Mayor
The novel established FMM 's reputation for precise use of prose,
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
60741 (4 October 1980): 8
received good reviews, and very nearly won the Polignac Prize.
Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists, Macmillan, 1987.
45
FMM was judged sensitive yet detached, firm and...
Reception Lucy Cary
Patrick Cary , the biographer's brother (himself a priest and poet), was said by the nineteenth-century editor to have made cuts in LC 's work based on his dislike of over-feminine material. But modern...
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
Reception Catherine Crowe
CC 's works were quickly made available in cheap editions, fit for the perusal of all classes.
qtd. in
Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland, 1988.
Partly by this means, she managed to attract many readers during the span of her career. Early critic...
Reception Germaine de Staël
Benjamin Constant , formerly the lover of GS , represented her in his novel Adolphe as a woman whose mind was the most wide-ranging of any woman ever, and perhaps of any man,
qtd. in
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, 2001, pp. 12-35.
26
and...
Reception Susanna Centlivre
SC hinted in A Woman's Case that her husband was upset at her threatening his livelihood with the political rashness of her dedication. The man-in-skirts role became a favourite of David Garrick , which kept...
Reception Penelope Fitzgerald
PF is on record as saying of her two genres of choice: I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often...
Reception Eliza Parsons
The Critical Review judged this a novel not one of the first order, or even of the second, and its characters too darkly tinted. The two plots were not sufficiently connected and the language had...
Reception Susan Ferrier
SF 's protagonists were included with those of Jane Austen , Frances Burney , Amelia Opie , Ann Radcliffe and others in W. D. Howells 's Heroines of Fiction, 1901.

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