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 Rosa Nouchette Carey
The Athenæum was lavish with faint praise. It likened Only the Governess to a tranquil backwater out of the main current of the turbid stream of modern fiction.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3151 (1888): 337
Praising Carey for not...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
The sales of this second novel nearly doubled those of Pym's first: Excellent Women sold 5,477 copies in the two months to June 1952, while Some Tame Gazelle sold only 3,722 in the thirteen years...
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...
Literary responses Frances Jacson
The Critical Review did this novel proud, first listing it, then praising it warmly for its superior moral tendency.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
4th ser. 1 (1812): 668
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
4th ser. 6 (1814): 688
Sarah, Lady Davy , told Sarah Ponsonby
Literary responses Eliza Lynn Linton
Geraldine Jewsbury , reviewing this novel for the Athenæum, was none too complimentary. She thought the author had offered an ineffective sermon on this excellent moral: clever, as anything she writes is likely to...
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...
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 Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
Meanwhile the vogue for The Wild Irish Girl was immense: Dublin ladies were wearing scarlet cloaks and golden bodkins, as Glorvina and as Owenson did.
Campbell, Mary, 1917 - 2002. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora, 1988.
71-2
She became (and remained more or less all her...
Literary responses Rachel Hunter
The Critical Review offered its warm commendation on the volume.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
3rd ser. 1 (1804): 118
Jane Austen 's teasing response to The Spoiled Child in particular appears in her own twelve-year-old niece's proudly claiming that...
Literary responses Frances Jacson
Maria Edgeworth read this novel on its appearance (firmly preferring it to Jane Austen's Emma), and two years later mentioned it as the title defining FJ 's achievement.
Percy, Joan. “An Unrecognized Novelist: Frances Jacson (1754-1842)”. British Library Journal, Vol.
23
, No. 1, 1997, pp. 81-97.
96n5
Published almost simultaneously with Austen
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, 1989.
242, 3
Long, Robert Emmet. The Films of Merchant Ivory. Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
25
Gates, Anita. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Screenwriter, Dies at 85”. The New York Times, 3 Apr. 2013.
She attracted less critical attention in...
Literary responses Regina Maria Roche
The Critical Review was reminded unpleasantly of Ann Radcliffe (from whom, indeed, says Rictor Norton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, passages are lifted without acknowledgement).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The Critical summed up this novel as...
Literary responses Rachel Hunter
This novel was the second of RH 's to be affectionately mocked by Jane Austen . Austen sent her niece the future Anna Lefroy a letter purportedly for delivery to RH herself, in the formal...
Literary responses Hannah Cowley
The Critical Review gave it a mixed and fairly unenthusiastic notice: it thought the play offered less pleasure to a reader than to an audience.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
55 (1783): 151
Jane Austen 's cousin Eliza de Feuillide
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
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, 2006, pp. 367-81.
374
Jane Austen implied in a letter of 1800 that the first volume of this work had left her mind stored...

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