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 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 Eliza Nugent Bromley
The Critical Review treated this novel with a fair degree of respect as told with elegance . . . frequently interesting.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
234
It has been generally, however, regarded as the leading model for Love and...
Reception Frances Burney
Burney's family were delighted. Her young half-sister Sarah Harriet (who was about to publish her own first novel) sent her a perfect rhapsody of praise.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press, 1997.
17-18
A long review in the Analytical Review, probably...
Reception Jane West
JW was well-known as a productive writer who nevertheless put out a great deal of domestic labour. Jane Austen , marvelling at her sister's time management skills, remarked: how good Mrs. West cd [sic] have...
Reception Charlotte Smith
Jane Austen transcribed a poem, Kalendar of Flora, from Minor Morals, perhaps in summer 1808 for her sister Cassandra.
Le Faye, Deirdre. A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
204, 351
Reception Eudora Welty
Like Austen 's Mansfield Park, Delta Wedding has been contradictorily read, some seeing its patriarchal estate as embodying utopia and some as dystopia. Reviewer Claudia Roth Pierpont argued in The New Yorker that Welty...
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 Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has been filmed repeatedly for both television and the cinema, as well as being made the subject of musicals, plays, and a ballet performed by the London Children's Ballet in 1997 and 2008...
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 Catherine Hubback
One reviewer of this novel took the hint offered by CH 's frequent reference to her aunt, and pronounced that she was allied to Jane Austen by genius as well as by blood.
Sutherland, Kathryn. Jane Austen’s Textual Lives from Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford University Press, 2007.
270
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 Jennifer Johnston
Critic Imhof Rüdiger attacked JJ (then the author of seven published novels) in 1985, arguing that she urgently needed to find new themes, and that her work was being compromised through self-repetition.
Imhof, Rüdiger. “’A Little Bit of Ivory, Two Inches Wide’: The Small World of Jennifer Johnston’s Fiction”. Etudes Irlandaises, Vol.
10
, Dec. 1985, pp. 129-44.
Johnston classifies reviewers...
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...

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