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
Reception Lucy Cary
Patrick Cary , the biographer's brother (himself a priest and poet), was said by the nineteenth-century editor to have made cuts in LC 's work based on his dislike of over-feminine material. But modern...
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
Reception Flora Macdonald Mayor
The novel established FMM 's reputation for precise use of prose,
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
60741 (4 October 1980): 8
received good reviews, and very nearly won the Polignac Prize.
Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists, Macmillan, 1987.
45
FMM was judged sensitive yet detached, firm and...
Reception Catherine Crowe
CC 's works were quickly made available in cheap editions, fit for the perusal of all classes.
qtd. in
Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland, 1988.
Partly by this means, she managed to attract many readers during the span of her career. Early critic...
Reception Germaine de Staël
Benjamin Constant , formerly the lover of GS , represented her in his novel Adolphe as a woman whose mind was the most wide-ranging of any woman ever, and perhaps of any man,
qtd. in
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, 2001, pp. 12-35.
26
and...
Reception Eliza Parsons
The Critical Review judged this a novel not one of the first order, or even of the second, and its characters too darkly tinted. The two plots were not sufficiently connected and the language had...
Reception Susanna Centlivre
SC hinted in A Woman's Case that her husband was upset at her threatening his livelihood with the political rashness of her dedication. The man-in-skirts role became a favourite of David Garrick , which kept...
Reception Penelope Fitzgerald
PF is on record as saying of her two genres of choice: I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often...
Reception Catherine Hubback
One reviewer of this novel took the hint offered by CH 's frequent reference to her aunt, and pronounced that she was allied to Jane Austen by genius as well as by blood.
Sutherland, Kathryn. Jane Austen’s Textual Lives from Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford University Press, 2007.
270
Reception Susan Ferrier
SF 's protagonists were included with those of Jane Austen , Frances Burney , Amelia Opie , Ann Radcliffe and others in W. D. Howells 's Heroines of Fiction, 1901.
Reception E. H. Young
An international conference, The Life and Work of Emily Hilda Young, was held in Bristol, organised by Stella Dean and Austen scholar Maggie Lane .
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.
324
Reception Vita Sackville-West
The enthusiastic review by J. C. Squire was not entirely welcome to VSW , since she regarded Squire as a silly old ass and all that.
qtd. in
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
167
She feared being relegated to the category of...
Reception Frances Burney
Burney's family were delighted. Her young half-sister Sarah Harriet (who was about to publish her own first novel) sent her a perfect rhapsody of praise.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press, 1997.
17-18
A long review in the Analytical Review, probably...
Reception Eliza Nugent Bromley
The Critical Review treated this novel with a fair degree of respect as told with elegance . . . frequently interesting.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
234
It has been generally, however, regarded as the leading model for Love and...
Reception Jennifer Johnston
Critic Imhof Rüdiger attacked JJ (then the author of seven published novels) in 1985, arguing that she urgently needed to find new themes, and that her work was being compromised through self-repetition.
Imhof, Rüdiger. “’A Little Bit of Ivory, Two Inches Wide’: The Small World of Jennifer Johnston’s Fiction”. Etudes Irlandaises, Vol.
10
, Dec. 1985, pp. 129-44.
Johnston classifies reviewers...

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