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
Residence Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown, 1997.
103
she...
Author summary Eleanor Sleath
ES was a popular novelist who published six titles, mostly with the Minerva Press , in little more than a decade, having begun just before the close of the eighteenth century. She sometimes intersperses poetry...
Publishing Eleanor Sleath
This book was written during a highly social period of ES 's life, and advertised in February 1799.
Czlapinski, Rebecca, and Eric C. Wheeler. Sleath Sleuth. New Eleanor Sleath Biography. 8 May 2011, http://sleathsleuth.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/new-eleanor-sleath-biography/.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 761
Most copies having been no doubt read to pieces, this is now a very rare...
Literary responses Eleanor Sleath
The Critical Review observed crushingly that vapid and servile imitations like this one were a severe penance for critics who had been seduced by Ann Radcliffe into admiration for the modern romance.
qtd. in
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 761
Jane Austen
Textual Features Edith Sitwell
Sitwell chose two women from before and five from during the eighteenth century, ten from the nineteenth century, and two from her own.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins, 1942.
The last entry is a moving tribute to the recently deceased Virginia Woolf
Literary responses Catherine Sinclair
The Athenæum reviewer somehow detected similarities between this book and the work of Jane Austen .
Athenæum. J. Lection.
964 (18 April 1846): 395
The Christian Examiner expressed anxiety regarding a literary heroine abstaining from the conventional route...
Textual Features Mary Martha Sherwood
The story is told in the first person. Royde-Smith thought the protagonist, who is clever and learns from her mistakes, resembled the heroines of Jane Austen . Less like Austen is the fact that she...
Textual Features Mary Shelley
MS discussed with her correspondents emotions, ideas, politics, and books. In 1839 she voiced admiration for Jane Austen 's humour, vividness and correctness, but added that Harriet Martineau had higher philosophical views.
qtd. in
Crook, Nora. “Sleuthing towards a Mary Shelley Canon”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
6
, No. 3, 1999, pp. 413-24.
424n29
Reception Vita Sackville-West
The enthusiastic review by J. C. Squire was not entirely welcome to VSW , since she regarded Squire as a silly old ass and all that.
qtd. in
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
167
She feared being relegated to the category of...
Textual Production Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS edited a volume of selections from Jane Austen, for which she wrote an introduction.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production Lady Margaret Sackville
LMS 's earliest works, which emerged from a romantic sense of beauty, defined her for decades of readers. In the first phase of her writing career, from 1900 to about 1915, she sought the delicate...
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...
Education Bernice Rubens
At university, she was President of both the student Music and Socialist societies, as well as a member of the Students' Union Council.
Gilbert, Sarah. “Bernice Rubens”. Cardiff University Magazine, Vol.
1
, No. 1.
BR later found that her education slowed her development as a writer...
Textual Production Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS published a largely epistolary novel which is designed as a companion piece to Jane Austen 's Emma. Entitled Jane Fairfax: A New Novel, it is written in a pastiche of early-nineteenth-century style.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Intertextuality and Influence Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS opens her story with Jane Fairfax as a little orphan growing up in the family of Colonel and Mrs Campbell, whose naughty daughter Euphrasia is a likable foil to her throughout. She ends it...

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