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 Harriett Mozley
HM 's brother John Henry (later famous as Cardinal Newman) said her first book had the fault of being too brilliant.
qtd. in
Tillotson, Kathleen et al. “Harriett Mozley”. Mid-Victorian Studies, Athlone Press, 1965, pp. 38-48.
38-9
It was read everywhere by both High and Low Church parties. Several...
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 Emily Eden
The Athenæum reported: A brighter book of travel we have not seen for many a day. It likened EE 's style to that of Lucie Duff Gordon and her wit, satire, and suggestion to those...
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 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 Susan Ferrier
This novel too was a success, if not quite so resoundingly as Marriage (to whose reputation more than one reviewer referred).
Cullinan, Mary. Susan Ferrier. Twayne, 1984.
68-9
The author's sister Helen (Mrs Kinloch ), an early reader, approached it...
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 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 Louisa May Alcott
Following her death, G. K. Chesterton in a laudatory (if sexist) review classed LMA with Austen as an early realist, and praised her apt depictions of human truths.
Chesterton, G. K. “Louisa Alcott”. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, G. K. Hall, 1984, pp. 212-14.
213-14
She was a favourite writer...
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 Ethel Wilson
Negative reviews seemed to repeat Macmillan 's original worry that the collection was half-cooked. Aunt Topaz was characterized by the Canadian Forum as a terrible bore, whom the reviewer found almost as tiresome to...
Literary responses Mary Brunton
Brunton's English publisher, Longman , registered in the year of publication that the book was in great demand and very much admired on the whole, though some complain of the later part of the work...
Literary responses E. M. Delafield
Punch gave the novel a very positive review, which Heinemann used in their advertising: An almost uncannily penetrating study of the development of a poseuse. Told with remarkable insight and a care that is both...
Literary responses Emily Eden
Marghanita Laski , who acknowledged the enjoyment purveyed by EE 's relish of polished cynicism, also felt she could be enjoyed only so long as Jane Austen is quite forgotten.
qtd. in
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Gale Research, 1981–2024, Numerous volumes.
110
EE 's Indian writings...
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...

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