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MARGARET KIRKHAM (ESSAY DATE 1983)

SOURCE: Kirkham, Margaret. “Allusion, Irony and Feminism in the Austen Novel.” In Jane Austen, Feminism, and Fiction, pp. 81-98. Brighton, England: Harvester Press Limited, 1983.

In the following essay, Kirkham asserts that Austen’s novels are both comic and feminist.

Comedy and the Austen Heroines: The Early Novels

F. R. Leavis placed Jane Austen as the inaugurator of the ‘great tradition’ of English nineteenth-century fiction. But she is unlike the later novelists of this tradition in that she writes comedies, that is, her novels preserve, and call attention to, certain formal features proper to comedy in its theatrical sense, and this is used to distance what is represented from life itself, even though character and events are made, for the most part, to look natural and probable. In George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Jane Austen (Letter Date 18 November 1814)
   2. Jane Austen (Novel Date 1817)
4. General Commentary
   1. Mary Lascelles (Essay Date 1939)
   2. Margaret Kirkham (Essay Date 1983)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Emma
   2. Pride and Prejudice
   3. Mansfield Park
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Jane Austen
2. Feminism