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.
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
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
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
Regina Maria Roche
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
Textual Production
Melesina Trench
Because a grand-daughter (Mary-Melusina, daughter of Richard Chenevix Trench) married a son of James Edward Austen-Leigh
(first biographer of his aunt Jane Austen
), MT
's papers are now housed with the Austen-Leigh papers at...
Textual Production
Michèle Roberts
In November 2011 MR
edited Wooing Mr Wickham, a collection of stories inspired by Jane Austen
or by Chawton House.
