JANE AUSTEN: FURTHER READING

Bibliographies

Handley, Graham. Jane Austen: A Guide Through the Critical Maze. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992, 139 p.

Provides a guide to Austen criticism from early reviews through the 1980s.

Roth, Barry. An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1984-94, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996, 438 p.

Offers a bibliography of studies on Jane Austen.

Biographies

Austen-Leigh, James. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: R. Bentley, 1870, 364 p.

Presents an affectionate biography of Austen by her nephew.

Chapman, R. W. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948, 224 p.

Provides an early biography by one of Austen's twentieth-century critics.

Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, 399 p.

Links Austen's life to her works.

Jenkins, Elizabeth. Jane Austen: A Biography. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1948, 286 p.

Offers a detailed treatment of Austen's life and works.

Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 512 p.

Attempts to correct the portrait of the sweet maiden aunt painted by Austen's family; considered by critics to be somewhat speculative in its alternative interpretation of Austen's life.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1997, 352 p.

Offers a popular biography focusing on Austen's family.

Criticism

Auerbach, Nina. "Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought About Fanny Price." Women and Literature 3 (1983): 11-28.

Considers the character Fanny Price from Mansfield Park as a version of the "Romantic monster."

Benedict, Barbara M. "Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy." In Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century 'Women's Fiction' and Social Engagement, pp. 147-99. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Links Austen's treatment of women as readers to the rise of consumer society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 310 p.

Contends that Austen's novels are a conservative reaction to the more liberal novels that preceded them but that she is innovative in narrative style and technique.

Craik, W. A. Jane Austen: The Six Novels. London: Methuen, 1965, 210 p.

Sees in Austen's novels a harmonic combination of the artist and the moralist; emphasizes the economy of Austen's style and plotting and the serious intent of the novels.

Devlin, D.D. Jane Austen and Education. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975, 140 p.

Interprets Austen's novels as delineating the educative process of their protagonists.

Duane, Anna Mae. "Confusions of Guilt and Complications of Evil: Hysteria and the High Price of Love at Mansfield Park." Studies in the Novel 33, no. 4 (winter 2001): 402-15.

Discusses the treatment of feminine desire with respect to the ending of Mansfield Park.

Duckworth, Alistair. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971, 239 p.

Focuses on the settings of Austen's novels and their social context.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Inside the House of Fiction: Jane Austen's Tenants of Possibilities." In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, pp. 107-86. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Comprises two essays, the first on gender and genre in Austen's juvenilia, the second on the novels; discusses Austen's representation of the social and political history of women in her works.

Harding, D. W. "Regulated Hatred." Scrutiny 8, no. 4 (March 1940): 346-62.

Focuses on Austen's satire and caricature and reads her novels as variations on the Cinderella tale.

Harris, Jocelyn. "Silent Women, Shrews, and Bluestockings: Women and Speaking in Jane Austen." In The Talk in Jane Austen, edited by Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg, pp. 3-22. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002.

Examines the treatment of female speech and female silence in Austen's novels.

Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, 186 p.

Asserts that Austen's novels contain a political element.

Michaelson, Patricia Howell. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, 261 p.

Applies a sociolinguistic approach to issues of gender, performance, and authority in Austen's novels.

Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952, 267 p.

Examines Austen's use of irony throughout her novels as well as in her letters and juvenilia.

Poovey, Mary. "Ideological Contradictions and the Consolations of Form: The Case of Jane Austen; True English Style." In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, pp. 172-207. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Compares Austen's style to that of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, placing her between Wollstonecraft's direct manner of expression and Shelley's self-effacing style, and connects narrative mode to the authors' ideology of femininity.

Said, Edward. "Jane Austen and Empire." In Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, edited by Terry Eagleton, pp. 150-64. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.

Interprets Austen's personal ideology as conservative, focusing on Mansfield Park.

Sulloway, Alison. "Emma Woodhouse and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Wordsworth Circle 7 (autumn 1976): 320-32.

Examines Austen's portrayal of women within the context of Mary Wollstonecraft's work, calling Emma a subversive and Romantic text.

Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, 291 p.

Acknowledges Austen's conservatism but nonetheless views her as a social critic; observes the close connection between Austen's controlled and precise prose and her morality.

Todd, Janet. "Who's Afraid of Jane Austen." Women and Literature 3 (1983): 107-27.

Considers Virginia Woolf's response to Jane Austen as intimidated; a comparative study of the novelists as women authors.

——. "Jane Austen, Politics, and Sensibility." In Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Sellers, Linda Hutcheon, and Paul Perron, pp. 71-87. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Analyzes Sense and Sensibility in the context of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cult of sensibility and its implications for women's sexuality.

Weldon, Faye. Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. London: Michael Joseph, 1984, 127 p.

Fictional letters from Weldon's persona Aunt Faye to her niece, a "punk" college student, attempting to convince her of Austen's merits; humorous but also scholarly.

Woolf, Virginia. "Jane Austen at Sixty." Athenaeum (15 December 1923): 433.

A speculative essay on the paths Austen's career might have taken after Persuasion.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Austen's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 19; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 3; British Writers, Vol. 4; British Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 116; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Exploring Novels; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Ed. 1; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 1, 13, 19, 33, 51, 81, 95, 119; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 14, 18; Twayne's English Authors; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; World Literature Criticism; and Writers for Young Adults Supplement, Vol. 1.