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.
PF
's publications in the scholarly field include an edition of The Novel on Blue Paper, an unfinished, unpublished work by William Morris
, 1982, and the introduction to a new issue of Oxford University Press
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P. D. James
James felt that detective stories offer far more detailed and realistic portraits of the way life was lived in the period of their writing than do many novels: Because the detective story is usually set...
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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...
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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...
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Michèle Roberts
In November 2011 MR
edited Wooing Mr Wickham, a collection of stories inspired by Jane Austen
or by Chawton House.
Roberts also selected the stories for this volume from those submitted to the...
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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...
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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
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Rose Tremain
RT
published a novel entitled Music and Silence, which she dedicated to her daughter, Eleanor.
Scholar John Mullan
has related the title to others employing two abstract nouns, like Elizabeth Inchbald
's Nature and...
Callow, Steven D. “A Biographical Sketch of Lady Anne Thackeray Ritchie”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
2
, 1980, pp. 285-7.
289
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Willa Cather
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...
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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...
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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
little book of criticism titled Jane Austen
, 1775-1817 for the British Book News series Writers and Their Work.
Staley, Thomas F., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 34. Gale Research, 1985.
34: 278
Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. Chatto and Windus, 1989.
244-5
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Georgette Heyer
GH
's next Regency romance, Bath Tangle (set in a place whose very name evokes Jane Austen
), features another heroine who needs special permission to marry.
Hodge, Jane Aiken. The Private World of Georgette Heyer. Bodley Head, 1984.
116, 209
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Deborah Moggach
DM
has written a number of TV screenplays, both from her own prose and that of others, and in the form of original scripts, from which several of her novels were expanded. She has adapted...
