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.
English reviewers, for instance in the Gentleman's Magazine, were ready with their praise.
Dow, Gillian. “The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writings for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
29
, No. 3, pp. 367-81.
374
Jane Austen
implied in a letter of 1800 that the first volume of this work had left her mind stored...
Literary responses
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
SFG
's importance to the influential Mary Wollstonecraft
can be gauged from the way that Wollstonecraft used and built on her writings, recommended them, measured others by their standard, and also did not hesitate to...
Textual Features
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
The feelings of this Emma are all in extremes. During her early passion she quotes Frances Greville
on the pains of sensibility.
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,. Emma. T. Hookham.
1: 66
She and her father kneel alternately to each other when she...
Author summary
Stella Gibbons
SG
was a gifted comic writer whose lively, parodic first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, was such a success that it has tended to eclipse her later achievements. Much of her writing was inspired by...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The plot opens when the young, urban, highly civilised, bossy London heroine, Flora Poste, decides (when her parents die leaving her an unexpectedly small income) to live off her exaggeratedly rustic Sussex relations. (Flora admires...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The novel is richly intertextual. Jane Austen
is a source of inspiration: Flora's sole occupational goal for the next thirty years is to collect material for a novel as good as Persuasion, but with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
Her contributions include Jane in Space, a science fiction story written in the style of Jane Austen
.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
213
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Her topic here is the social complications that arise when a wife, unusually, has her own independent income.
Vargo, Lisa. “<span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Lodore</span> and the ’Novel of Society’”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
6
, No. 3, pp. 425-40.
435
CG
's preface calls this a Novel of the simplest kind, addressed by a woman to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes and very slightly alters four lines from Pope
beginning What gay ideas crowd the vacant brain,
Gore, Catherine. Mothers and Daughters. Bentley.
title-page
but whereas Pope's imaginary Teresa Blount
was daydreaming idly and innocently of the dukes and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes the passage in Swift
's Gulliver's Travels where the King of Brobdingnag hears from Gulliver about English politics and marvels that human grandeur can be mimicked by such contemptible insects.
Gore, Catherine. The Hamiltons; or, Official Life in 1830. R. Bentley.
title-page
The...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
Like its predecessor, this novel recalls Jane Austen
, but this time the plot (at least the earlier part) is closer to that of Sense and Sensibility. Marcia, a sensible elder sister, makes a...
Textual Features
Catherine Gore
The title of this novel, published in 1836, echoes and responds to Anna Brownell Jameson
's Diary of an Ennuyée, 1826. The hero, Byronic Lord Eustace Hartston, keeps the heroine, Lady Harriet Delaval, some...
Textual Production
Catherine Gore
In The Cabinet MinisterCG
borrowed the foundations of a plot from Jane Austen
once more, in the story of an impoverished sister and brother, Bessy and Frank Grenfell, brought up out of reluctant charity...
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...
