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 Mary Augusta Ward
The novel was a massive success, in the words of Henry Jamesa momentous public event.
qtd. in
Ward, Mary Augusta. “Introduction”. Robert Elsmere, edited by Rosemary Ashton, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. vii - xviii.
vii
Critic John Sutherland deems it the best-selling work of quality fiction in the nineteenth century. By the summer...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
The Athenæum compared this novel favourably to the work of Jane Austen , saying that HM outstripped her predecessor in creating characters of a higher order of mental force and spiritual attainment, and offering to...
Literary responses Angela Thirkell
Reviewers were complimentary. One called the book an amusing pastiche in the manner of Jane Austen .
Strickland, Margot. Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. Duckworth, 1977.
114
Literary responses Harriett Mozley
A review in the Christian Remembrancer likened this novel to those of Jane Austen .
Mozley, Dorothea, editor. Newman Family Letters. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1962.
119
More than a century later Kathleen Tillotson agreed that it confirms HM 's place in the Austen tradition.
Tillotson, Kathleen et al. “Harriett Mozley”. Mid-Victorian Studies, Athlone Press, 1965, pp. 38-48.
46
Literary responses Elizabeth von Arnim
This novel elicited a wide range of responses from reviewers. John Middleton Murry consoled EA when she received harsh criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He told her there was no way to protect...
Literary responses Maria Edgeworth
John Ward, later Earl of Dudley , who had at first admired ME 's tales, later compared her to her disadvantage with Jane Austen (whose name, however, he did not know) and suspected Richard Lovell Edgeworth
Literary responses E. H. Young
V. S. Pritchett was moved by The Curate's Wife to liken EHY (as did many critics) to Austen .
Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. “’She must be a very good novelist’: Rereading E. H. Young (1880-1949)”. English Studies in Canada, Vol.
27
, No. 3, Sept. 2001, pp. 303-31.
315
EHY received a number of letters begging for this story (in itself a sequel) to...
Literary responses Anita Desai
Donna Seaman , reviewer for Booklist, invoked the comparison of AD to Austen and acknowledged some substance to the parallel: indeed, she is a deceptively gracious storyteller, writing like an embroiderer concealing a sword...
Literary responses Jane West
This work had the unusual distinction of earning approving comments from both Austen and Wollstonecraft . The contrasted sisters are generally seen as an important source for Austen 's Sense and Sensibility, and the...
Literary responses Charlotte Smith
CS 's biographer Loraine Fletcher feels that in her Catherine the young Jane Austen uses Ethelindeas a touchstone of literary intelligence for her characters.
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan, 1998.
121
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering, 1989, 7 vols.
7: 188
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan, 1998.
120-1
Literary responses Elizabeth Inchbald
A Simple Story was praised by no less a modern authority than Q. D. Leavis ,
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
(8 September 1989): 964
and received a more recent accolade from Terry Castle as the most elegant English fiction...
Literary responses Eliza Nugent Bromley
Peterson has pointed out that this novel is probably as much a target in Austen 's Love and Freindship as is its predecessor. It received, however, very different reviews (the Analytical's probably written by...
Literary responses Sarah Harriet Burney
Charles Burney , too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
lxii
Jane Austen later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Critics have felt that GH 's Regency novels mutated gradually from romance to comedy of manners. Of course no clear line can be drawn between the two. Some reviewers compared Heyer with Jane Austen because...
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...

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