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 heroine is described as deriving from a long line of English gentry, Whig supporters of the Empire: a tedious race perhaps and pig-headed, tyrannical too here and there, but on the whole honourable English...
Gore, Catherine. Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb. R. Bentley.
title-page
As the Edinburgh Review noticed, Cecil's launching as a coxcomb takes place in 1809, the year that Byron began writing Childe Harold, and his final moral awakening...
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Lively
As controversy has been Henry's domain, reading has been Charlotte's. For ever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. Reading has taught her how sex...
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
Viola Meynell
VM
moves away from theological influence here, as her prose becomes dispassionate and satiric. This novel lacks plot interest; its strength lies in its emotional texture. In a manner that has been likened to Jane Austen
Leisure and Society
Rumer Godden
With books hard to come by, RG
read and re-read those she had, often sent her by relatives and often new publications. She called Austenexactly what I need and likened herself to Emma.
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
207
Leisure and Society
Jennifer Johnston
Although JJ
says she is always reading contemporary young men and women writers coming out of Ireland today,
Moloney, Caitriona et al. Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices From the Field. Syracuse University Press.
67
in her short list of her most beloved books Ireland is just outnumbered by England and...
Leisure and Society
Edith Somerville
In her later years ES
set out to extend her reading. She tried Woolf
's A Room of One's Own (at the behest of Ethel Smyth
) and admired it. But she could not like...
Leisure and Society
Elizabeth Heyrick
In the year 1827 EH
's reading included all of Jane Austen
's completed novels and Mary Russell Mitford
's Our Village.
Beale, Catherine Hutton, editor. Catherine Hutton and Her Friends. Cornish Brothers.
179
Leisure and Society
Carola Oman
In a letter to the Times in 1962, CO
described a bookcase in her writing-room which held the works she described as All the Winners. For a writer of fairly conservative views and strong...
Literary responses
Ethel Wilson
Negative reviews seemed to repeat Macmillan
's original worry that the collection was half-cooked. Aunt Topaz was characterized by the Canadian Forum as a terrible bore, whom the reviewer found almost as tiresome to...
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...
Literary responses
Frances Jacson
The Critical Review did this novel proud, first listing it, then praising it warmly for its superior moral tendency.
Jane Austen
joked in a letter about taking this novel as fact. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three...
Literary responses
Catherine Gore
The year after these two novels appeared, a writer in The New Spirit of the Age measured CG
unflatteringly against the humour of Frances Burney
or the lifelike precision of Jane Austen
, but credited...
