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
Performance of text Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Genlis' daughters gave performances of these plays to large audiences (up to five hundred people).
Dow, Gillian. “Books owned by Jane Austen’s niece, Caroline, donated to Chawton House Library”. The Female Spectator, Vol.
1 n.s.
, No. 4, 2015, pp. 1-3.
2
The work was several times translated into English (beginning in late 1780) as The Theatre of Education. A...
politics Eleanor Rathbone
Nearly seventy, ER volunteered for war work herself, and despatched her car (which she called Jane Austen after the novelist and the Austin make of car) for active service.
Johnson, Richard William. “Associated Prigs”. London Review of Books, 8 July 2004, pp. 19-21.
21
Author summary Eleanor Sleath
ES was a popular novelist who published six titles, mostly with the Minerva Press , in little more than a decade, having begun just before the close of the eighteenth century. She sometimes intersperses poetry...
Author summary Sarah Green
Besides a conduct book, a translation, and a pamphlet, SG wrote most fictional forms available to her: novels in several modes, stories, romances, and most notably mock-romances. She was one of the ten most prolific...
Author summary Joan Aiken
JA was a popular and successful later twentieth-century writer of short stories and longer fictions for children, most of which are fantasies or have strong supernatural or mystery elements. She also wrote adult novels (both...
Author summary Stella Gibbons
SG was a gifted comic writer whose lively, parodic first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, was such a success that it has tended to eclipse her later achievements. Much of her writing was inspired by...
Author summary E. M. Delafield
EMD 's charming, witty novels are characterized by acute observation and good-humoured social satire. Her stories often draw from her own experiences—as an Edwardian débutante, a novice in a religious order, a war worker, and...
Author summary Sheila Kaye-Smith
Writing mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, SKS published thirty-one novels, in addition to about twenty works in other genres: biography, criticism, saints' lives, country lore, and books of memoirs (one of...
Author summary Catherine Hubback
CH , a niece of Jane Austen , began her publishing career in the mid nineteenth century with her completed version of a novel left unfinished by her famous aunt, of whom she also wrote...
Author summary Emma Tennant
ET wrote and published in many genres between 1973 and the second decade of the twenty-first century, and often blended one genre with another.
Wilson, Frances. “Emma Tennant obituary”. theguardian.com, 31 Jan. 2017.
At first a novelist (who later became a specialist in the...
Author summary Barbara Pym
BP was a distinguished, understatedly comic novelist of the twentieth century, whose autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, and notebooks) were published only after her death.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press, 1992.
1-2, 9
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984, p. various pages.
xiii-xiv
Having achieved moderate success during her early career...
Publishing Eleanor Sleath
This book was written during a highly social period of ES 's life, and advertised in February 1799.
Czlapinski, Rebecca, and Eric C. Wheeler. Sleath Sleuth. New Eleanor Sleath Biography. 8 May 2011, http://sleathsleuth.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/new-eleanor-sleath-biography/.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 761
Most copies having been no doubt read to pieces, this is now a very rare...
Publishing Anne Grant
Early in her conception of this project, Grant invoked the Spirit or the Muse of Biography: on what calm elevation dost thou reside, surrounded by the powers of just discrimination, candid discussion, and true delineation...
Publishing Ethel Wilson
The book was produced in England but copies shipped to Canada bore a Canadian imprint.
Stouck, David. Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography. University of Toronto Press, 2003.
110
Publication was delayed for some time. Upon first receiving the manuscript in early 1945, EW 's editors at Macmillan
Publishing Flora Thompson
The Ladies Companion printed most of a winning competition entry by FT (who was not yet an author), an essay required to capture in 300 words her understanding of Jane Austen 's success.
Lindsay, Gillian. Flora Thompson: The Story of the Lark Rise Writer. Hale, 1996.
81 and n3

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