Abstract
Many biographers have written social lives of Jane Austen, and for good reason. Material for a biography of Austen’s life is scanty. Apart from her works themselves and the letters that were selected by her sister to be as unrevealing as possible, for information about her we have to rely on family records and traditions along with a few comments from other contemporaries. The family sources tend to stress Austen’s ordinariness, indeed to seem proud of it. They considered the decorous absence of ‘very important, very recordable events’ in her life as appropriate for an unmarried woman as it was for the ball at the Crown in Emma (326). In short, although Austen’s genius, her brilliant wit, and her consummate art confront us in all her writing, she herself must always elude us in what is written about her.
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Notes
‘Profile of Women Writing in English from 1660 to 1800’, in Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (eds), Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 248.
Critical Review 37 (1774), p. 475. Cited by Antonia Forster, ‘“Women First, Artists Second”: Images of Women as Writers and Readers, 1749–1785’, unpublished paper read at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Association meeting in 1988.
Judith Phillips Stanton, ‘Charlotte Smith’s “Literary Business”: Income, Patronage, and Indigence’, in Paul J. Korshin (ed.), The Age of Johnson, 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1987), pp. 376–7.
Carla Hesse, ‘Reading Signatures: Female Authorship and Revolutionary Law in France, 1750–1850’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 22:3 (1989), p. 486.
See also Margaret Anne Doody’s compelling analysis of Burney’s struggles with ‘authority’ in the prefatory verses to her father: Frances Burney: the Life in the Works (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1988), pp. 31–2, 37–8.
Annie Raine Ellis (ed.), The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1778, 2 vols (London: George Bell, 1907), 1:39.
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst et al., 1824), 1:88–9.
See Antonia Forster, ‘The Business of Reviewing’, read at the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting, March 1990. See also Index to Book Reviewing in England, 1749–1774 (Carbondale Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).
Dorothy Blakey, The Minerva Press (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 73–4; Stanton, ‘Charlotte Smith’s “Literary Business”’, p. 388.
Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, ‘Introduction’, Camilla, or a Picture of Youth (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. xx, xix;
Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 337.
Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, ‘Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790–1820’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987), p. 198 and n38, pp. 206–7.
For example, Burney is particularly querulous in an 1817 letter to the House of Longman, objecting to their view that sales of The Wanderer (1814) had ceased (Letter 1113, 30 Aug. 1817, in Warren Derry (ed.), The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) 10: 631–2.
Edith J. Morley (ed.), Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (Manchester University Press, 1918), p. 24.
The date is provided by Deirdre Le Faye, ‘JA: Some Letters Redated’, Notes and Queries (Dec. 1987), p. 479.
Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the late John Murraiu, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1891), 1:288.
See Jan Fergus and Ruth Portner, ‘Provincial Subscribers to the Monthly and Critical Reviews and their Book Purchasing’, in O.M. Brack Jr. (ed.), Festshrift for William Todd (New York: AMS Press, 1990).
[Henry Austen], ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’, in JA, SS (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), p. viii.
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© 1991 Jan Fergus
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Fergus, J. (1991). Conditions of Authorship for Women, 1775–1817. In: Jane Austen. Macmillan Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21665-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21665-9_1
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