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 previously published essays include pieces on Austen
and Landseer
, and the early Toilers and Spinsters.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Bowen
She writes admiringly of Jane Austen
, but far less so of George Eliot
, whom she regards as over-intellectual.
Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
81-2
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Augusta Ward
Perhaps the most interesting is her review (March 1884) of Harry Buxton Forman
's recent edition of Keats
. Ward argues that the letters to Fanny Brawne
ought not to have been made public. (She...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marghanita Laski
She insists that even Jane Austen
. . . could write letters of a bitchiness and coarseness not inferrable from the impeccable sense of human values in her books.
Laski, Marghanita. “To the Editor: ’George Eliot and Her World’”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 3725, 27 July 1973, p. 869.
869
She posits an underlying double...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Catherine Hubback
On the topic of Jane Austen
's first accepting, then rejecting, the proposal of Harris Bigg-Wither
, CH
wrote that the acceptance must have been given in a momentary fit of self-delusion, and that Jane...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant's views on the status of women shifted somewhat with time. She dismissed the women's suffrage petition, and represented women who supported suffrage as unnatural. Answering Barbara Bodichon
, she argued that marriage was...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Lady Margaret Sackville
Austen
, she says, was the first really modern novelist . . . more modern in a sense than Dickens
or Thackeray
.
Austen, Jane. “Introduction”. Jane Austen, edited by Lady Margaret Sackville, Herbert & Daniel, 1912, p. ix - xvi.
xi
This publication, together with the anthology, suggests that LMS
was pursuing...
Travel
Mary Russell Mitford
On this trip she also visited Bristol and (very briefly) Barnstaple in Devon. In Bath she was haunted (like many visitors after her) by the idea of Jane Austen
characters, and at Bristol by...
Travel
Harriette Wilson
HW
's presence with her first lover, Lord Craven, at his family's estate of Ashdown Park in the Berkshire Downs was recorded in a letter by Jane Austen
, who wrote that Craven had...
Travel
Eliza Fletcher
In her eighties, travelling with her youngest daughter, she visited Winchester Cathedral and the shrine
qtd. in
Southam, Brian. “Jane Austen and Winchester Cathedral”. Persuasions, Vol.
24
, 2002, pp. 226-40.
226
of her admired Jane Austen
.
Southam, Brian. “Jane Austen and Winchester Cathedral”. Persuasions, Vol.
