Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection.
McNeillie, Andrew, and Virginia Woolf. “Introduction”. The Common Reader, Annotated Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984, p. ix - xv.
x
Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting...
Textual Features
Margaret Drabble
Frances Wingate is accustomed to working with ancient bones, to conferences in distant countries and interviews in glossy magazines—also to sudden plunges into howling despair. For reasons she does not understand, she has ended a...
Textual Features
Viola Meynell
Through satire, gender issues emerge for the first time in Meynell's work: women are portrayed as fatuous, wanting nothing more than to please men; men, in their turn, are dull and ineffectual.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
Her narratives detail the life events, character, appearance, and publication histories of the various authors. Frequently, as in the case of Austen
, she devotes more time to sketching a physical and mental character than...
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...
Textual Features
Margaret Drabble
Speaking at a Jane Austen
conference in 1993, MD
said that in this book she was doing something entirely new for her, in moving into, or close to, the occult.
Textual Features
Henrietta Rouviere Mosse
In The Wayward (Weird) Sister the same character is writing a journal which owes its origin to Samuel Richardson
, that is to Miss Byron, the indefatigable Miss Byron, and Clementina. Oh, but I shall...
Jane Austen
's Emma (in which this novel is mentioned) seems to have picked up some trifles from its plot. Roche's Marlowe hides his love for the impoverished Fanny because of his dependence on his...
Textual Features
Muriel Jaeger
This book is sometimes called a memoir, but its autobiographical moments are only incidental. MJ
's attention is mostly directed towards books and reading; her own experiences of writing, publishing, and having her works performed...
Textual Features
Sara Jeannette Duncan
The Imperialist features a double-stranded plot focusing on a Canadian brother and sister. Lorne Murchison pursues a connection with Britain through formal trade agreements while Advena Murchison unites the countries with bonds of affection when...
The book reflects the Leavis's lofty tone about that large majority of authors who fail to measure up to the best.Jane Austen
was not given a section—because, F. R. Leavis insisted, she was too...
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
