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
Textual Features Catherine Hubback
The younger sister is Emma Watson, who has been educated away from home, and who on returning to her impoverished family finds herself out of sympathy with her elder sisters' quest to attract husbands. As...
Textual Features George Paston
In the Dictionary of Literary BiographyRebecca Brittenham likens this novel's play on gothic convention to Jane Austen 's Northanger Abbey.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
197
Paston sets her novel in a country house, where an innocent young...
Textual Features Mary Berry
Like most of her correspondents, Berry is somewhat wordy, given to tiptoeing round the nuances of sentiment. Her letters to Walpole, like his to her, are divided between professions of affection and the endless chronicle...
Textual Features Edith Sitwell
Sitwell chose two women from before and five from during the eighteenth century, ten from the nineteenth century, and two from her own.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins, 1942.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
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 Elizabeth Bonhote
A third-person narrative relates how Ellen, gentle as the dove, harmless as the lamb, and modest, without being reserved,
Bonhote, Elizabeth. Ellen Woodley. William Lane, 1790, 2 vols.
1: 7
and her exemplary rural clergyman father succeed in redeeming and reforming the unprepossessing Edwin...
Textual Features Catherine Gore
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 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 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 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 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 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...
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 Charlton
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...

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