Women readers and the Victorian Jane Austen

Restricted until 25 Nov. 2011."Women Readers and the Victorian Jane Austen" reveals how the study of women's contributions to Victorian debates is vital to understanding Austen's literary reputation. More generally, it also stakes a claim for the central role of the nineteenth-century novel as a crucial genre for women writing literary criticism. I analyze unexamined feminist readings of Austen's work in canonical novels alongside lesser-known works of fiction, family history manuscripts, letters, and other ephemera in the Bodleian Library, the Hampshire Record Office, and the Jane Austen House Museum. Taken together, the case studies in this recovery project demonstrate that feminist thought is inextricably intertwined with Jane Austen's critical legacy. Contrary to current assumptions, Austen's feminism was not "discovered" during the second-wave feminist movement by scholars in the academy (e.g., Margaret Kirkham, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Claudia Johnson) -- rather, it has always been an integral, though largely ignored, aspect of women's responses to Austen's work.; The first two chapters of the project unearth the work of two Victorian woman writers in the Austen family: Catherine Hubback and Fanny Caroline Lefroy. Their interpretations of Austen's stories challenge images of Austen presented by male-authored reviews in Victorian literary magazines as well as nineteenth-century biographies penned by men in the Austen family. Drawing on the recovery work of these initial chapters, my third chapter suggests that Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley (1849) can be read as a critical response to Austen's novels. My reading recontextualizes the most infamous female response to Austen in Victorian times: Charlotte Brontë's critiques of Austen's novels written in letters to George Eliot's companion George Henry Lewes. The dissertation ends with a chapter that highlights the importance of reexamining the making of Jane Austen's literary reputation. I show how ideas from Victorian texts still influence interpretations of Austen's novels as I scrutinize Jane Austen's own engagement with Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754)