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.
In the 1920s WC
was working for a maximum of three hours a day, banishing her work from her mind during the rest of day, but keeping herself fresh for it. She said her only...
Textual Production
Sheenagh Pugh
This subject provides her with an unusual angle on intertextuality: SP
investigates not only the proliferation of sequels to Jane Austen
novels (by Joan Aiken
, Emma Tennant
, and many others) but also the...
Textual Production
Joan Aiken
Next year came The Smile of the Stranger, a historicalromance whose English heroine experiences not only the French Revolution (since she has been living with her father in France) but other markers of...
Textual Production
Sarah Waters
SW
wrote her foreword to Dancing with Mr Darcy. Stories Inspired by Jane Austen
and Chawton House Library, selected in a competition which she had also judged, and published this year.
Waters, Sarah. “Foreword”. Dancing with Mr Darcy, Honno, 2009, pp. 1-4.
4
Textual Production
Barbara Hofland
The learnedness of allusion and the Austen
-like style of satiric storytelling are both unlike BH
's usual manner. It was not her usual practice, either, to publish anonymously, without mention of other works.
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
Spark's first Brontë project was a group biography of the whole family, including the parents. In June 1949 she felt like a pregnant tigress with this work. It was to be published by Lindsay Drummond
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
QDL
was arranging her lectures and essays on Jane Austen
into book form. Despite interest from publishers and although QDL
continued to write regularly on Austen, the monograph was never completed.
MacKillop, Ian. F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. Allen Lane, 1995.
263, 339-40
Textual Production
P. D. James
PDJ
published a historical detective novel she said she wrote for fun and in order to combine two great enthusiasms (detection and Jane Austen
): Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
qtd. in
Crown, Sarah. “A life in writing: PD James”. Guardian.co.uk, 4 Nov. 2011.
In another article of similar date (early 2017), Alderman praises an early love, the webcomic, formerly the comic strip. Her favourites include as Kate Beaton
's webcomic Hark a Vagrant, which often, as in...
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
QDL
delivered the Jane Austen
Bicentenary Lecture at the University of Newcastle
. It was published posthumously as an essay.
Kinch, M. B. et al. F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis: An Annotated Bibliography. Garland, 1989.
126-7
Textual Production
P. D. James
PDJ
gave the annual lecture to the Jane Austen Society
at Chawton House in Hampshire (where Austen
was a regular visitor); it was entitled Emma Considered as a Detective Story.
James, P. D. Time to Be in Earnest. Faber and Faber, 1999.
RW
produced several introductions to novels by other writers, including Jonathan Cape
's editions of Kathleen Coyle
's Liv (1929), Jane Austen
's Northanger Abbey (1932), and Sarah Orne Jewett
's The Only Rose and Other Tales (1937).
West, Rebecca. “Bibliography”. Rebecca West: A Celebration, edited by Samuel Hynes, Viking Press, 1977, pp. 761-6.
