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 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 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 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...
Textual Features Winifred Peck
The story opens with a young man returning from the First World War and ends with young people returning from the second. At the outset seventeen-year-old Miranda Rae, living in Devon with her family, receives...
Textual Features Doris Lessing
Her topics range from cats to Sufism and censorship and from Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf to Anna Kavan and Muriel Spark .
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 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 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 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 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.
320-2
According to...
Textual Features Annie Keary
All these lives and more are woven together. Mrs Edgecombe has been independently managing a large estate, and she and Walter cannot agree: Clemency could not help noticing the quiet masculine assumption of being necessarily...
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 Jane West
The Danbury ladies take an avid interest in the arrival at a nearby mansion of Mr Dudley and one of his two daughters, whose mother is dead. Again the contrasted heroines (this time sisters) follow...
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 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...

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