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.
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, pp. 36-53.
39
The point of reading Jane Austen
is...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Maria Callcott
After her first return from Italy and again later in her life, Maria Graham (later MC
) did book reviews for the publisher John Murray
. She expressed her admiration for contemporary literature: Coleridge
,...
Literary responses
Rosa Nouchette Carey
The Athenæum was lavish with faint praise. It likened Only the Governess to a tranquil backwater out of the main current of the turbid stream of modern fiction.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3151 (1888): 337
Praising Carey for not...
Health
Dora Carrington
Carrington attempted to give herself a miscarriage by riding a horse violently, and when this did not work she became depressed to a nearly suicidal degree.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. John Murray.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
207
The novel is both gothic and parody gothic, and uses science fiction as a vehicle for the discussion of ideas. The story is told from...
Reception
Lucy Cary
Patrick Cary
, the biographer's brother (himself a priest and poet), was said by the nineteenth-century editor to have made cuts in LC
's work based on his dislike of over-feminine material. But modern...
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...
Reception
Susanna Centlivre
SC
hinted in A Woman's Case that her husband was upset at her threatening his livelihood with the political rashness of her dedication. The man-in-skirts role became a favourite of David Garrick
, which kept...
Textual Features
Mary Charlton
MC
's targets are the same as those of Jane Austen
's juvenilia: the motifs and the hyperbole of sentimental and gothic novels. It is not her heroine but her heroine's mother who is led...
Literary responses
Mary Cholmondeley
None of these later novels achieved the success of Red Pottage. Critic Vineta Colby
writes that MC
's last novels invited the neglect they received from critics and public alike, because of their extreme...
Friends, Associates
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Liddell was to remain one of ICB
's close friends. She maintained a benevolent, almost aunt-like relationship with him, and although resident abroad he was an important source of support after Jourdain's death. He later...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ivy Compton-Burnett
This was a new influence added to those of the Victorian novelists (especially the women), Shakespeare
, and Jane Austen
, whom she admired extravagantly (Even her dull scraps are music to me)...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Bowen
, in her laudatory review, likened the icy sharpness of ICB
's dialogue to the sound of glass being swept up one of these London mornings after a blitz.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.
