Miss Austenish

English

Etymology

From Miss Austen +‎ -ish.

Adjective

Miss Austenish (comparative more Miss Austenish, superlative most Miss Austenish)

1. Synonym of Austenish.
   • 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:

     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—[…]

   • 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:

     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.

   • 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:

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

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

     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.

   • 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:

     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.

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

     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.