AQA (B): Paper 1 Aspects of comedy
Today’s chick-lit is written by, for and marketed to women Its pink and gold covers are as enticing as a chocolate box. ‘Real men’ keep their distance. But Jane Austen did not write exclusively for women, though there is evidence that women formed the majority of her readers. Indeed, it is only within the last couple of decades that she has come to be seen as primarily a writer for women — thanks largely to her more excessive fans and their bonnets. In her own lifetime Jane Austen could count the Prince Regent, his librarian, fellow novelist Walter Scott and the poets Coleridge and Southey among the male admirers of her work. A century later there is evidence that Jane Austen was widely read among troops in the trenches of the First World War, and Kipling’s story The Janeites (1924) suggests continuing numbers of male admirers, not just among the officer classes. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, gentlemen with a taste for literature would measure their ideal woman against Jane Austen’s heroines.
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
