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.
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
Textual Features
Eudora Welty
The word regional, said Welty, is careless, condescending, and an outsider's term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing.Jane Austen
, theBrontësisters
, and the writers...
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
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
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
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
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...
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
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.
39
The point of reading Jane Austen
is...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ
contributed an introduction to a volume, the seventh in John Lehmann
's The Chiltern Library, published in 1947 and containing two titles by Elizabeth Gaskell
. In her introduction to Thackeray
's Vanity...
Textual Production
Joan Aiken
JA
published Eliza's Daughter, which ties in with and continuesJane Austen
's Sense and Sensibility, by relating the story of Colonel Brandon's mysterious ward.
“Joan Aiken”. Fantastic Fiction.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Patricia Beer
PB
's Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen
, Charlotte Brontë
, Elizabeth Gaskell
, and George Eliot was a harbinger of serious critical interest in the women's literary tradition.
