Jane Collier - Style

Style

Collier's The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting has been described as the "best-known generic satire written in the eighteenth century by a woman." She is one of the many female 18th-century authors (including Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Charlotte Turner Smith) who experimented with "alternative models for relationships, for different ways of regarding others and even for ameliorating society."

As a sign of his favor for Collier's style, satiric humor, and classical learning, Henry Fielding wrote in the beginning of an edition of Horace:

To Miss Jane Collyer,
This Edition of the best
of all the Roman Poets,
as a Memorial (however poor)
of the highest Esteem for
an Understanding more than
Female, mixed with virtues almost
more than human, gives, offers up
and dedicates her Sincere Friend
Henry Fielding

This was one of the last works that Fielding would write because he left that evening on a trip to Lisbon where he died two months later.

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Famous quotes containing the word style:

    There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
    Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)

    Carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. He not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it. He has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.
    W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)