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 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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Anne Stevenson
In the title-poem, each of five stanzas ends with a version of the first closing lines: we thought we were living now, / but we were living then.
Stevenson, Anne. Selected Poems, 1956-1986. Oxford University Press, 1987.
128
These we, it seems, are...
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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...
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Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS
later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
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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...
She and her father kneel alternately to each other when she...
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Charlotte Yonge
The paired heroines, Emily and Lilias Mohun, have been traced to Austen
's Sense and Sensibility (though Yonge's pair are only two among a large family).
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House, 1996.
5
Hayter inadvertently gives Emily's name as Elinor.
Hayter, Alethea. Charlotte Yonge. Northcote House, 1996.
5
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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...
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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...
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George Eliot
Ashton
discerns here the influence of Jane Austen
, but she deals with a wider social range and, unlike her predecessor, hints at dialect in the speech of her rustic characters.
Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. Hamish Hamilton, 1996.
176
But perhaps the...
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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...
