'England's Jane': the legacy of Jane Austen in the fiction of Barbara Pym, Dodie Smith and Elizabeth Taylor

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1951), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) and Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian (1946) are all strongly influenced by Jane Austen and were published in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This was a pivotal time in the reformulation of Englishness, during which Austen’s place in the national imaginary was being reinvented and debate about the meaning of English culture and identity, to which I shall return, was at its most intense.