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The Count de Rethel: An Historical Novel (1779) can be ascribed to Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806) as a translation of Anecdotes de la cour de Philippe-Auguste (1733) by Marguerite de Lussan. The action is set at the court of Philip II of France, known as Philip Augustus, at the time of the war with King Henry II and the Crusade with Richard I, known as the Lionheart. This inspired revival of fictionalised medieval history heralding romanticism in the age of sensibility refashions the codes of chivalry according to the aesthetics of the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay focuses on the interplay between fiction and history, between the present of writing and the rewriting of history through Cavendish’s translational prism, featuring the Middle Ages as a golden age of heroism and the Count de Rethel as a paragon of ancient virtue set against contemporary men of fashion.

In her article \"The Female Best-Friend Novel: Narration and the Reconsideration of the Political Act,\" Neta Stahl argues that twentieth-and twenty-first-century women novelists borrowed the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century best-friend narrative, reintroducing it for the purpose of challenging the very concept of the political act, namely, what modern, liberal society considers as a political action and what stands behind it. The article focuses on four novels written by novelists from four different countries: the American novelist Toni Morrison's Sula (1973); the Israeli novelist Ronit Matalon's Sarah, Sarah (2000); the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale: Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (Book 3 of The Neapolitan Novels: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2013); and the British novelist Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016). It demonstrates that in these novels, the political act is reconsidered, against the gaze of the best-friend and against the role of a supposedly female 'prince charming'. Further, Stahl argues that the modern female best- friend novel is not a 'female counterpart' to the male best-friend novel, but rather a new take on a female literary tradition associated with a genre that is often dismissed by the intellectual elite as popular literature, thanks to its use of low-brow devices borrowed from the nineteenth-century novel.

The background and historical context of Aphra Behn's The Fair Jilt (1688), a narrative set in Antwerp, has occasioned a fair amount of critical interest. Janet Todd in her 1996 biography of Behn was the first to establish the author's indebtedness to a sensational criminal case involving one François Louis Tarquini, his wife Maria Theresia Van Mechelen, and her sister Anna Louisa. Assembling and interpreting a number of unexplored legal documents preserved in the Antwerp City Archives and the State Archives in Brussels, we aim to provide a much fuller and more accurate account of the events which inspired the composition of The Fair Jilt. Behn may have derived some of this information from two printed sources which have so far escaped scholarly notice: the Hollandsche Mercurius, a Dutch yearbook which reported on the Tarquini court case, and an extensive, apologetic pamphlet authored or commissioned by Maria Theresia van Mechelen, and published in 1663. While primarily focused on the background and contexts, this article also seeks to explain Behn's major adaptations of the historical facts, including her treatment of the protagonist Prince Tarquin, whom she appears to have fashioned in accordance with her beliefs in the spiritual and moral superiority of the Stuart line.

Granted, it's a bad novel, full of the very novel clichés that Austen set about to undermine, but, nevertheless, Emma's creative temperament appears akin in many ways to Austen's own. [...]Emma shares Austen's capacity, normally restrained by decorum, to mimic the characteristic speech patterns of others and to skewer people with sharply worded observations. Austen's letters, however, suggest that at this same time, January 1813, she was considerably advanced in writing Mansfield Park, a novel with a heroine whom generations of readers have found difficult to like, for Fanny Price utterly lacks Elizabeth Bennet's wit and charm even while she shares her intelligence, courage, and integrity. Between 1811 and 1816, then, Austen's mind would have been crowded with the diverse possibilities of the heroines of her imagination as she interrogated the received novel form and reinvented the novel heroine in order to challenge readers' complacent assumptions, as Mr. Knightley repeatedly challenges Emma's. Other innovations in Emma, notably Austen's control of readers' sympathy through narrative point-of-view (Booth 243-66, Claudia Johnson 196) and her use of free indirect discourse (Cohn 108, but also Flavin, Ferguson, Finch and Bowen), have also drawn much comment. Yet unlike the other flawed Good Girls, she is deliberately endowed with unpleasant character traits like snobbery and smugness. [...]because Emma lacks the social and economic vulnerability of Elizabeth Bennet or Fanny Price, or the emotional pathos and isolation of Fanny Price or Anne Elliot, she does not earn sympathy for being snubbed, oppressed, or neglected. [...]her unattractive qualities...

Austen Editions: original works, under Austen if no extensive annotation or editing is involved, otherwise under the editor’s name Austen Circle: original works/editions by and about Austen family members and friends Austen Studies: biographical, critical, and interpretive works Dissertations: a select, rather than exhaustive, list of works specifically on Austen Popular Culture: sequels, continuations, mash-ups, films, merchandise, etc. “First Impressions.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life 233 (2013): 33-38. First published in 2011 by Honno (Aberystwyth, Wales).

While readers have appreciated the lyricism of her prose, particularly in Persuasion, we have yet to come to terms with Austen's poems.1 They have been largely ignored, determined by their biographical context, and damned with faint praise.2 In commentary, the language of diminution is omnipresent: the poems are \"light,\" \"small,\" \"little,\" and \"cute\" (Lambdin and Lambdin, 'Austen's Poems\" 415, 416, 420); 'To the memory of Mrs. Lefroy\" is noted as an exception, and inevitably condemned as a failure. [...]her poetic voice is subordinated to the family refrain. All of this evidence problematizes the frequent claim that Austen wrote poems only as part of correspondence or family entertainment. [...]the latter point rehearses the precise terms on which the juvenilia long had been dismissed. Poems attributed to Jane Austen, concluding against Austen's authorship of these texts. 5. Because some of the poems were untitled by Austen, or do not exist in manuscript form, there is considerable variation in the titles among the various editions.

Cassandra doesn't eat, but devours the frozen treats she steals, depicting the kind of appetitive frenzy witnessed in other early heroines (such as Charlotte Lutterell and her \"Devouring Plan\" in Lesley Castle \\^114T\\) and suggesting a form of compensatory response to the suppression of bodily drives and \"appetites\" advocated in conduct books and other forms of prescriptive literature written for young women readers.10 Indeed, Cassandra's theft introduces another defining element of the Juvenilia, for throughout these works young heroines sabotage the maledriven economy by stealing commodities, services, and sums of money large enough to send them to the gallows. [...]returning in the last chapter, after an absence of nearly seven hours, to her \"paternal roof in Bond Street\" (46), Cassandra is \"pressed to her Mother's bosom by that worthy Woman\" (47). If conduct books and prescriptive discourses from Austen's era pressed young girls to \"learn how to control and, if possible, eradicate £ their] desires, especially those for independence, close female friendship, personal wealth and involvement in power\" (Sermons xiv), as Janet Todd argues in a different context, then Austen's work ridicules this notion while at the same time demonstrating how these kinds of regulatory discourses actually provoke the very behaviors they condemn, lending young women an exhilarating, almost sexual degree of excitement at the prospect of \"spending,\" like Cassandra, their time and energies in such forbidden, taboo enjoyments.11 In The Beautifull Cassandra and the other early works, we find Austen rethinking the conventions and governing assumptions that structure the various formal and generic incarnations of the novel, while simultaneously, as Claudia Johnson suggests, \"seekpng^] out and bringing] to light the agendas that inherited forms conceal by violating those forms\" (48). [...]one of the more popular and widely reprinted conduct books of the period, John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters ( 1 774; reprinted in Todd's edition of Sermons), highlights female \"wit\" as \"the most dangerous talent\" a young woman can possess ( 14); recommends girls not to be \"anxious to share the full extent of £their] knowledge\" (15); and confesses, \"When a woman speaks of her great strength, her extraordinary appetite, [or] her ability to bear excessive fatigue, we recoil at the description\" (23).

Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies 4 (Feb. 2006). Money and Matrimony: A Fantasy Sequel to Pride and Prejudice. “[Playing Games with Jane Austen: The Game Motif and the Reader in Emma.]” Journal of English Language and Literature/Yongo Yongmunhak 52 (2006): 153-78. “Fashioning the Child Author: Reading Jane Austen’s Juvenilia.”

NSW woman Janet Todd Walker was fined $15,000 and convicted of grievous bodily harm after her dog Benny mauled the leg of an 82-year-old man at Caloundra in August. \"This 82-year-old man was out for a stroll, minding his own business, when the dog attacked him and mauled his calf,\" Sunshine Coast regional council's Sheryl Krome said.

  Bedford Square Books is the smallest of the publishing houses delivering out-of-print books to digital readers. Established by the literary agent Ed Victor, it has fewer than 20 titles, which are drawn from some of Victor's clients, including Edna O'Brien. It has reissued her 1986 book Tales for the Telling: Irish Folk and Fairy Stories (3.69), a children's curiosity with several folk tales I had never come across before, including Paddy the Piper and The Magic Apples. It served as a surprisingly prescient introduction to O'Brien's greatest-hits collection, The Love Object: Selected Stories, just published by Faber (hardback, 20; Kindle edition, 9.89) - and reviewed on page 10 of today's Weekend Review. Janet Todd, a scholar of early women's writing, was a particular discovery for me. Todd introduced the Restoration spy and playwright Aphra Behn to popular consciousness, and her Secret Life of Aphra Behn (6.99) is a thorough, readable account of a life dominated by secrecy and literary success that bucks all social and gender expectations. Todd's Lady Susan Plays the Game (6.99) is probably the earliest piece of Austen-inspired fiction. As one of the most important 20th-century Austen scholars, Todd takes up with the eponymous heroine as she attempts to avoid a life of doomed widowhood in the English countryside. The style is Austenian, and the character just as unsympathetic as Austen intended, though the risks Todd bestows on Susan in her manipulations are perhaps more than Austen might have imagined. It is less fun than Seth Graham-Smyth's infamous Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Kindle edition, 4.98), perhaps, but it is certainly more intellectually and emotionally satisfying.