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.
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
Anita Brookner
The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
Textual Features
A. S. Byatt
Her trenchant comments on the art of fiction include: If you don't see art as being profoundly related to the pleasure principle there's something wrong with you.
Friel, James, and Jenny Newman. “A. S. Byatt”. Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews, edited by Sharon Monteith et al., Hodder Headline, 2004, pp. 36-53.
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
Virginia Woolf
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
Anne Katharine Elwood
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
Sheila Kaye-Smith
This is, like Sussex Gorse, the story of a man driven by monomaniacal ambition, and like Jane Austen
's Sanditon (from which it could hardly be more different in tone) the story of a...
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
L. E. L.
The novel also has a strong political element. It comments on the power of newspapers in national life, through reporting and editorials but also through advertising. Mr Delawarr is, says literary historian Edward Copeland, a...
Textual Features
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Here she relates significant moments in her life to what she was reading at the time. She says that her reading, directed at first by chance and the choices of others, later moved towards what...
Textual Features
Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML
blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
