Miss Austenish

comparative more Miss Austenish · superlative most Miss Austenish

1. archaicSynonym of Austenish.

   If this were a little more clever, it would be Miss Austenish.

   1895 February 15, “The Wares of Autolycus. A Novel for the Reaction.”, in The Pall Mall Gazette, 4th edition, volume LX, number 9328, page 5, column 2

   5 more examples

   How Miss Austenish it sounded: the managing rector’s wife, her still more managing old maid of a sister, the neighbouring clergyman who played the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty daughter just out—[…]

   1888, Mrs. Humphry Ward [i.e., Mary Augusta Ward], “Westmoreland”, in Robert Elsmere, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., chapter II, page 24

   Her cousin has all the odds in his favor, except that she is not in love with him; but then she is so sensible and so Miss-Austenish that that seems a small obstacle.

   1890 September 13, “Misadventure. A Novel. By W. E. Norris, […]. Armorel of Lyonesse. A Romance of To-Day. By Walter Besant, […].”, in The American: Journal of Literature, Science, the Arts, and Public Affairs, volume XX, number 527, Philadelphia, Pa., page 433, column 1

   We have again, most happily, Mr. Tarkington’s Miss Austenish eye, which, figuratively speaking, sees in the occasion of a bad egg for breakfast the inception of a divorce.

   1918, Robert Cortes Holliday, chapter VII, in Booth Tarkington, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, page 161

   Excellent inn, the George, plainly the best in Lichfield, and staffed with good, kindly people. What an immense difference civility in an inn does make. The George, we noticed, has a grand Assembly room. Very Miss Austen-ish.

   1945, Nikolai Tolstoy, quoting Patrick O’Brian, “‘The smallest habitation I had ever seen’”, in Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist, London: Century, published 2004, →ISBN, page 344

   It [Commonplace by Christina Rossetti] was very much ‘in the Miss Austen-ish vein’ as Christina’s brother [Dante] Gabriel [Rossetti] remarked, and indeed boasts a disastrous picnic and a garrulous chaperone in Miss Drum to rival Emma’s Miss Bates, while the maiden ladies of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) also come to mind.

   1994, Jan Marsh, “Commonplace”, in Poems and Prose, London: Everyman, J. M. Dent; Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, published 1999, →ISBN, section “Fiction”, page 354

   Synonyms: Austenish