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.
Joanna Cannan
(a friend of GH
) based a character on her in No Walls of Jasper (1930) who is described in Heyeresque style. She is not beautiful, not pretty; her nose was too large...
Literary responses
Isak Dinesen
When this, like ID
's first book, became a Book-of-the-Month Club
choice, she felt it would cheapen the recognition awarded the earlier work—showing that she misinterpreted this commercial honour as a purely critical one.
Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen. Penguin, 1984.
312
Literary responses
George Eliot
John Morley
, anonymously in the Saturday Review, noted that [o]ne of the puzzles, which runs pathetically through Felix Holt as through Romola and the The Mill on the Floss, is the evil...
Literary responses
Amy Levy
The Jewish press was outraged by what it saw as the antisemitism of this novel. The Jewish Chronicle did not review it, but implied strong disapprobation in an article entitled Critical Jews. The Jewish...
Literary responses
Charlotte Yonge
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen
's nephew James Austen-Leigh
compared it to the work of Austen and Scott
...
Literary responses
Ann Radcliffe
AR
's rival M. G. Lewis
finished reading Udolpho within ten days of its publication, though he had during the same time travelled from England to the Hague.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
Critic Jenny Uglow
argues that My Lady Ludlow is an important—an original and brave
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
468
book—although its experiment in creating a feminine fiction based on women's lives, carefully observed, is not entirely successful. In terms...
Literary responses
Hannah More
Next year saw a rich crop of reviews. Sydney Smith
in the Edinburgh Review, while praising HM
's style and her skill at manipulating her readers, damned the novel as over-moralized, strained and unnatural...
Literary responses
Catherine Hubback
Geraldine Jewsbury
's review praised the novel as among the best of a good crop that year, noting: The story is as quiet as one of Miss Austen
's, but the characters and incidents are...
Literary responses
Alice Meynell
Virginia Woolf
was angered by AM
's opinion that Jane Austen
was a frump (and was even angrier that Meynell advised reading Sterne
's Tristram Shandy in an expurgated edition).
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
2: 503
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Reviews were extremely positive. Most expressed a sense of loss to English letters at EG
's recent death, and compared Wives and Daughters to her other well-loved book, Cranford. The Athenæum likened the style...
Literary responses
Constance Smedley
This work was reviewed by Mary Webb
for the Bookman in January 1925 together with Ethel Sidgwick
's Laura: A Cautionary Story and V. H. Friedlaender
's The Colour of Youth.
Crawford, Mary, and Bruce Crawford. “Selected Bibliography of Writings By and About Mary Webb”. Mary Webb, Neglected Genius, 2010.
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...
Literary responses
E. M. Hull
Patricia Raub
views The Sheik as the precursor of the mass-marketed romances initiated by Harlequin Romance novels in 1957.
Raub, Patricia. “Issues of Passion and Power in E. M. Hulls The SheikWomens Studies, Vol.
21
, 1992, pp. 119-28.
123
The plot line which pits a young, beautiful, inexperienced, and aristocratic heroine against a tall...
