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.
Photograph of a colourized print of Jane Austen, from a drawing by a Mr Andrews commissioned by Austen's nephew James Edward Austen Leigh as frontispiece to his "Memoir of Jane Austen", 1870 (fifty years after she died). She is shown seated, with a book on her lap, wearing a blue dress and light brown bonnet.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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.
qtd. in
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
160
ICB received a...
Publishing Cassandra Cooke
CC must have submitted the manuscript of her novel to the publisher Cawthorn well before October 1798, when she confided to her young cousin Jane Austen her annoyance over Cawthorn 's delays. At this date...
Intertextuality and Influence Cassandra Cooke
The Critical Review offered a plot-summary of Battleridge and said that the grasp of seventeenth-century manners was good, but the work is not very amusing; and, in point of composition, it is despicable.
qtd. in
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 778
Family and Intimate relationships Cassandra Cooke
CC was a first cousin of her namesake Cassandra Leigh Austen , and first cousin once removed, as well as godmother, of the latter's daughter Jane Austen . The older and younger novelist were not...
Family and Intimate relationships Cassandra Cooke
Cassandra's cousin Jane Austen criticised the household management of Samuel Cooke (who was her godfather), judging him a disagreable, fidgetty master to his servants.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
In his professional capacity he worried about competing with the Methodists
Friends, Associates Cassandra Cooke
CC met Warren Hastings and his wife Marian at Adlestrop in January 1791, and remained on friendly terms: she sent a message congratulating him at the end of his marathon trial.
Le Faye, Deirdre. A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
132, 175
She and...
Family and Intimate relationships Blanche Warre Cornish
He later assumed his mother's birth-name, becoming Warre Cornish. He was older than his wife by seventeen years, and had fallen love with her when she was only sixteen.They had eight children together: in the...
Literary responses Hannah Cowley
The Critical Review gave it a mixed and fairly unenthusiastic notice: it thought the play offered less pleasure to a reader than to an audience.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
55 (1783): 151
Jane Austen 's cousin Eliza de Feuillide
Reception Catherine Crowe
CC 's works were quickly made available in cheap editions, fit for the perusal of all classes.
qtd. in
Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland, 1988.
Partly by this means, she managed to attract many readers during the span of her career. Early critic...

Timeline

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Texts

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