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.
The title of this novel, published in 1836, echoes and responds to Anna Brownell Jameson
's Diary of an Ennuyée, 1826. The hero, Byronic Lord Eustace Hartston, keeps the heroine, Lady Harriet Delaval, some...
Textual Features
Muriel Spark
Spark's introduction speculates about the neglect of Mary Shelley, suggests as possible cause the fact that no single, facile cliché can encapsulate her, and puts forward a witty and trenchant list of the clichés to...
Textual Features
Mary Ann Kelty
The book bears in various details the influence of Jane Austen
, though its overall project of pious didacticism is at odds with Austen's approach. The title-page quotes Rousseau
on the topic of the sensitive...
Textual Features
Dorothy Boulger
The plot follows in the tradition of Austen
's Pride and Prejudice: chance causes the heroine and future hero to dislike one another on sight, after which she has to learn to overcome her...
Textual Features
Mary Martha Sherwood
The story is told in the first person. Royde-Smith thought the protagonist, who is clever and learns from her mistakes, resembled the heroines of Jane Austen
. Less like Austen is the fact that she...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Though Theresa writes most of the letters in the book, the opening one, as often in women's epistolary novels at this date, is an exchange between men. Tomlins, however, does not attempt to capture a...
Textual Features
Lady Louisa Stuart
LLS
's letters to Scott
show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Textual Features
Mary Ann Kelty
At the end of the first volume Mortimer twice proposes to Eliza: once face to face and unpremeditatedly, then by letter. She does not accept him. By the end of the next volume he is...
Textual Features
Mary Shelley
MS
discussed with her correspondents emotions, ideas, politics, and books. In 1839 she voiced admiration for Jane Austen
's humour, vividness and correctness, but added that Harriet Martineau
had higher philosophical views.
qtd. in
Crook, Nora. “Sleuthing towards a Mary Shelley Canon”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
6
, No. 3, 1999, pp. 413-24.
424n29
Textual Features
Mary Lavin
The novel is a treatment of Irishmiddle-class values.The domestic setting, opening strategy, and structure of the novel appear to be influenced by the work of Jane Austen
, on whom ML
had written her MA thesis.
Krawschak, Ruth, and Regina Mahlke. Mary Lavin: A Checklist. R. Krawschak, 1979.
29
Textual Features
Margaret Oliphant
Elisabeth Jay points out that the title might suggest a bildungsroman with a female protagonist, like Emma by Austen
, whose fine vein of feminine cynicism
qtd. in
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
60
Oliphant admired.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
66
But Hester, unlike Emma, is...
Textual Features
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
wrote frequently on lesser-known female writers. The collected essays in From an Island include, in addition to the piece on Austen
, one on Heroines and Their Grandmothers which contrasts the cheerful heroines of...
MC
's targets are the same as those of Jane Austen
's juvenilia: the motifs and the hyperbole of sentimental and gothic novels. It is not her heroine but her heroine's mother who is led...
Textual Features
Maria Edgeworth
The title is ironic: the protagonist is an irritating simpleton (prefiguring Austen
's Mrs Bennet), whose very funny dialogue has its roots in ME
's Essay on . . . Self-Justification.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon, 1972.
