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.
FW
's five-part dramatisation of Jane Austen
's Pride and Prejudice was screened.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research, 1982–1983.
14: 752
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.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research, 1985.
25
Textual Production
Fay Weldon
FW
published Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen, a book whose contents are what its title suggests.
Faulks, Lana. Fay Weldon. Twayne, 1998.
71
Textual Production
Joanna Trollope
JT
's modernised retelling of Sense and Sensibility (published in October 2013), is one of a series of projected Jane Austen
updates. In January 2014 Trollope discussed Austen in a podcast with Fay Weldon
in...
Textual Production
Joan Aiken
JA
again partnered herself with Jane Austen
, completing the earlier of Austen's two unfinished novels as Emma Watson, The Watsons Completed.
This unfinished novel, a standing temptation to sequel-writers, was first completed by...
Textual Production
Christina Stead
In 1972 CS
spent three painful months over a commission to review Quentin Bell
's life of Virginia Woolf
. She found many aspects and supposed aspects of Woolf repugnant: her alleged lack of appreciation...
Textual Production
Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF
sent to Anne Grant
are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...
Textual Production
Joanna Trollope
JA pursued her Austen
connection with a talk on her at a charity Christmas supper held at Chawton House Library
on 5 December 2015.
Textual Production
Joan Aiken
JA
published another novel conceived of as complementary to Austen
: The Youngest Miss Ward, a prequel to Mansfield Park.
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
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
Margaret Drabble
MD
made her journalism debut early. In 1967 she wrote in the Guardian about the accomplishment of the sexual revolution brought about by the contraceptive pill. It was a major component of women's liberation, she...
Textual Production
Fay Weldon
In 2003 FW
contributed a foreword to a new edition of Austen
's juvenile Love and Freindship (which, unusually, corrects the title to Love and Friendship).
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
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.
