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.
Critics have pointed to a range of influences and allusions in this novel. Kate Flint
has suggested that the representation of the sorrowful-eyed aesthete Francis Chaloner was a satiric jab at Oscar Wilde
, who...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriett Mozley
Her letters, on the evidence of those included in Dorothea Mozley
's Newman Family Letters (published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
in 1962), are highly intelligent and entertaining. As a girl she rattles...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Gardam
Most of these stories inhabit JG
's familiar territory among suburban women of a certain age, but other protagonists are very different: a dirty old tramp, a reluctant male homosexual, and, in the title story...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Taylor
Tomkins (whose words open the novel in very much the way that Sterne
's narrator opens A Sentimental Journey) is in search of a wife, but early rules out the heroine from consideration. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
Writing to Mary Russell Mitford
of her hope that they might meet, HM
acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me.
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett.
For a period of time after Goodbye, Stranger, SB
did very little writing but a great deal of reading, including the novels of Jane Austen
. She said she felt extremely middle-aged
Bedell, R. Meredith. Stella Benson. Twayne.
11
at...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Eden
EE
's preface explains that she first set this novel in what was then the present day: the pre-Reform-Bill, pre-railway era. She did not wish to update it in revising, so it is now set...
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
Samuel Richardson
Innumerable women novelists later conducted a dialogue (some admiring, some rebutting or revising) with SR
. Few could ignore his influence completely. Frances Brooke
wrote his biography; Anna Letitia Barbauld
edited his letters, and Jane Austen
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
Ali Smith
Like most of AS
's work, this novel is playfully self-reflexive in its adherence to typical story structure. In a formulaic breakdown of essential narrative parts, The Accidental has a prescribed Beginning, Middle...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. M. Delafield
The novel presents a conflict of values between an optimist, a benign canon whose five children have trouble living under his Victorian principles, and a cynic, a World War One veteran who has published an...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
The story opens with a situation borrowed from Jane Austen
's Pride and Prejudice: a mother desperate to get five daughters safely married because the family estate is entailed away in default of a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lucy Walford
In Recollections of a Scottish Novelist, LW
records her early love of literature. The books she read as a child, especially at the age of seven—including Charlotte Yonge
's The Little Duke, works...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Sarah Hoey
Miriam finds local gossip that Florence is attempting to entrap her father ludicrous, and describes it as a comic parallel to Vanity Fair, with Florence not as Becky Sharp but as Amelia having to...
