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
Literary responses Henrietta Sykes
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 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.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.
160
ICB received a...
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.
312
Literary responses Isabella Neil Harwood
This novel generated a large amount of attention and positive reviews. They all made some points in common: they loved the plot, the way Minnie/Minna's character developed, the originality and the sustained interest it provided...
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 Anne Mozley
George Eliot not only praised this review in a letter, but also instructed her publisher to send a copy of her next novel, The Mill on the Floss, to Bentley's expressly so that it...
Literary responses Harriette Wilson
Admiration of HW as a writer united historian Eric Hobsbawm and editor Karl Miller . Miller judged the memoirs a well-written serious work, as much a work of social history, a study of class and...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
In a negative review in the Sunday Times (headed The Loneliness of Miss Pym), Anita Brookner described Pym's tone and characterizations as coldly detached and reductive, and complained of a determined sexlessness of the...
Literary responses Diana Athill
Through her great age and greater panache DA became something of a cult figure. Edward Field wrote that she functioned for the British public as the Chief Guide to Old Age.
Field, Edward. “Edward Field’s Introduction”. Letters to a Friend, p. xi - xx.
xx
She was awarded...
Literary responses Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
Jane Austen called this novel very good and clever, but tedious.
Nicholls, C. S., editor. The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons. Oxford University Press.
Literary responses Frances Trollope
FT 's rambunctious widow was greatly admired by both her male and female readership. Even the Athenæum, which was usually unsupportive of her work, offered a positive review: [s]o frequently has it been our...
Literary responses Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
RPJ was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1976, the Neil Gunn International Fellowship in earlier 1979, a MacArthur Foundation Grant in 1983, and a CBE in 1998.
Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Macmillan.
242, 3
Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Harry N. Abrams.
25
Gates, Anita. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Screenwriter, Dies at 85”. The New York Times.
She attracted less critical attention in...
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...
Literary responses Anita Brookner
Critic John Bayley found AB on top of her form in this novel, spinning a plot line as strong as any of Jane Austen 's.
“Pages of pleasure”. Guardian Weekly, pp. 12-13.
12
Literary responses Jane Taylor
Critic Stuart Curran calls this volume brilliant. He notes the resemblance of its fine irony
Curran, Stuart. “The I Altered”. Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, Indiana University Press, pp. 185-07.
192
to that of Jane Austen (despite the fundamental earnestness of Taylor's Dissenting attitudes). Presenting those attitudes as a crucial...

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