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 Margaret Kennedy
Reviewers have likened Kennedy to Jane Austen , one of her literary role models. In a review for the New York World, Beverley Nichols stated that she would be a robust Jane Austen,...
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 Mary Hays
One of Jane Austen 's sisters-in-law owned a copy. Some reviewers objected both to content and arrangement. The European Review was not untypical in that although it expressed some admiration it also called for a...
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 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 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...
Residence E. M. Delafield
Virginia Woolf did, however, visit EMD , and wrote to her niece in November 1935 that Delafield lives in an old house like a character in Jane Austen ; whom she adores. But she has...
Residence Mary Russell Mitford
The first period of poverty after his marriage caused him to move his family from Alresford in Hampshire. (MRM later remembered the Hampshire countryside with warm affection, and delighted in its nearness to...
Residence Anne Mozley
The garden, though not the house, was liable to flooding by the River Trent. John Wordsworth observed that the conversation at Barrow was as good as anything in Miss Austen 's novels.
Wordsworth, John, Bishop of Salisbury, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, 1892, p. xii - xx.
xviii
Elizabeth...
Residence Mary Anne Barker
MAB and her husband, Frederick Broome , called their cottage at the sheep station, from their own name, Broomielaw. It stood in the Malvern Hills on the banks of the Selwyn River, attached...
Residence Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown, 1997.
103
she...
Textual Features Virginia Woolf
She writes more directly of money, of the riches lavished through the ages on masculine institutions like the ancient universities, but here too her clinching example is one of the imagination: her contrast of the...

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