Robert William Chapman

In her day EJ knew most of the London literary world. She met Agatha Christie , whom she described as the most elegantly dressed elderly woman I have ever seen. She counted among her...

The earliest reviews, said EJ , were not encouraging and some were both tepid and denigratory . . . because [the reviewers] felt it was a dead bore to have to read about Jane Austen...

At this date, said EJ later, there was, astonishingly, no complete life, including chronological discussion of works, of Jane Austen. Modern scholarship, however, had just begun, largely in the work of R. W. Chapman ...

EJ was one of the founders of the Jane Austen Society , launched in 1940. She campaigned for the purchase (achieved in 1947) of the cottage at Chawton in Hampshire where Austen lived for her...

MC went back to work at Oxford University Press , at the invitation of R. W. Chapman , helping on the weekly Oxford Magazine.

HLP was a voluminous letter-writer all her life. Though scholarly estimates differ, there is no doubt that thousands of her letters survive. The first selection appeared in print in 1833. Many early editions, however, had...

JA was a great family letter-writer. She wrote letter-chronicles to her sister whenever they were apart, and letters of literary advice to her several young relations who attempted novel-writing. As late as 1870 her descendants...

Modern criticism of Austen, now remarkably rich and varied, may be seen as having begun with a monograph by Mary Lascelles , Jane Austen and her Art, 1939, which was also the first to...

In 1933 there was excitement in the book-collecting world when a small collection of books that Austen had owned (by writers like Ariosto , Goldsmith , Hume , and Thomson ) appeared in the catalogue...

The younger sister is Emma Watson, who has been educated away from home, and who on returning to her impoverished family finds herself out of sympathy with her elder sisters' quest to attract husbands. As...

EJ contributed an introduction to a volume, the seventh in John Lehmann 's The Chiltern Library, published in 1947 and containing two titles by Elizabeth Gaskell . In her introduction to Thackeray 's Vanity...

A TLS review by R. W. Chapman sounded distinctly anti-feminist. He wrote that by employing heroic remedies, the indomitable editor has cut away all the elaborate openings and studied conclusions, masses of domestic detail, nine-tenths...