Abstract
Women seldom featured as contributors to the early nineteenth-century British periodical press; when they were discussed as authors, it was common for their works to be criticised for being over-emotional and moralistic or for venturing outside the sphere appropriate to their sex. Considering a range of articles published between 1815 and 1831, this chapter attempts to account for the contrastingly laudatory tone of commentary on Jane Austen’s novels, revisiting Walter Scott’s review of Emma in the Quarterly Review and the follow-up article by Richard Whately, whose treatment of the emotional resonances of Austen’s fiction is especially acute, at the same time as exploring some little-known anonymous criticism and highlighting the insights of the first identifiably female writer on Austen, Maria Jane Jewsbury.
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Wilkes, J. (2019). Jane Austen and the Politics of the Periodical Press. In: Macleod, J., Christie, W., Denney, P. (eds) Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32467-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32467-4_7
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