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.
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 Hutton
CH
had come seriously to admire Jane Austen
: Her novels are pictures of common life, something like mine, but much more varied, and her character is either something like mine, or what I would...
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
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Passages in The Lover's Companion are grouped according to different kinds of love situation (first love, love at first sight, unrequited love, etc.). Authors used include Jane Austen
, Anthony Trollope
, Oscar Wilde
,...
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
Q. D. Leavis
Here QDL
discusses some of Oliphant's personal experiences, motives for publishing, and the lingering cultural resistance to women authors: we note that still, as in Jane Austen
's family and age, one of the conditions...
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...
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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...
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
Catherine Hutton
Of particular value in CH
's letters are her comments on literature. She offered detailed views on (probably) Elizabeth Heyrick
's Exposition, a pamphlet about economics, admiring the language while doubting Heyrick's capacity to...
Textual Features
Sophia Lee
The preface to this book, newly written for its publication, is SL
's major critical statement about the woman's literary tradition and her own place in it. She mentions the hostile reception of her own...
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
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.
