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.
This novel marks AR
's first big success. It drew widespread critical acclaim.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
83
The Critical Review praised it and likened the author to Clara Reeve
(while making an issue of the fact that, though...
Intertextuality and Influence
John Oliver Hobbes
JOH
's speeches and interviews regularly deal with literature. In an interview with William Archer
, she admits to admiring Arthur Wing Pinero
's characterisation of women, while noting how little individualised are some of...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. M. Delafield
The novel presents a conflict of values between an optimist, a benign canon whose five children have trouble living under his Victorian principles, and a cynic, a World War One veteran who has published an...
Intertextuality and Influence
Katherine Mansfield
She opens her review by evoking the experimental, critically controversial current state of the novel, before presenting the surprising picture of Night and Day sailing into port serene and resolute.
Majumdar, Robin, and Allen McLaurin, editors. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
79
The image of a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriett Mozley
Her letters, on the evidence of those included in Dorothea Mozley
's Newman Family Letters (published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
in 1962), are highly intelligent and entertaining. As a girl she rattles...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Mary Wollstonecraft
, though she saw many virtues in this book, was not happy that Adelaide was educated to be obedient, not independent-minded: that with all her accomplishments she was ready to marry any body...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Taylor
Tomkins (whose words open the novel in very much the way that Sterne
's narrator opens A Sentimental Journey) is in search of a wife, but early rules out the heroine from consideration. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Sarah Hoey
Miriam finds local gossip that Florence is attempting to entrap her father ludicrous, and describes it as a comic parallel to Vanity Fair, with Florence not as Becky Sharp but as Amelia having to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
As early as 1824 MRM
was asking the advice of friends as to whether they thought she could be a novelist.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 29
She added one of her frequent disclaimers: I write merely for remuneration...
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)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
Writing to Mary Russell Mitford
of her hope that they might meet, HM
acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me.
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett.
This, like Good Behaviour, is a black comedy set in a crumbling Anglo-Irishbig house, Durraghglass. Unlike Good Behaviour it sets its protagonist family (of the same generation as Aroon St Charles) in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Harriet Burney
Lorna J. Clark, editor of SHB
's letters, notes the abundant portrayal in her novels of dysfunctional families.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
Innumerable women novelists later conducted a dialogue (some admiring, some rebutting or revising) with SR
. Few could ignore his influence completely. Frances Brooke
wrote his biography; Anna Letitia Barbauld
edited his letters, and Jane Austen
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
Like most of AS
's work, this novel is playfully self-reflexive in its adherence to typical story structure. In a formulaic breakdown of essential narrative parts, The Accidental has a prescribed Beginning, Middle...
