Jane Austen

Austen, Jane (1775-1817) is considered to be a mother of English novel. She is a major English novelist, whose brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction marks the transition in English literature from 18th-century neoclassicism to 19th-century romanticism.

Austen was born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon, of which her father was rector. She was educated at home and never lived apart from her family, in which she was the seventh of eight children. The Austens moved from Steventon in 1801, living thereafter in Bath, Southampton, Chawton, and Winchester. Austen began as a child to write novels for her family. Some of her youthful efforts, written as early as 1790, were published in Love and Freindship and Other Early Works (1922).

Jane Austen's six complete adult novels were written in two distinct periods. Those of her first period (1796-1798) took more than 15 years to find a publisher. During this time she wrote Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813); and Northanger Abbey (1818). Her three early novels form a distinct group in which a strong element of literary satire accompanies the comic depiction of character and society.

Sense and Sensibility tells the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters. Marianne is the heroine of “sensibility”— i.e., of openness and enthusiasm. She becomes infatuated with the attractive John Willoughby, who seems to be a romantic lover but is in reality an unscrupulous fortune hunter. He deserts her for an heiress, leaving her to learn a dose of “sense” in a wholly unromantic marriage with a staid and settled bachelor, Colonel Brandon, who is 20 years her senior. By contrast, Marianne's older sister, Elinor, is the guiding light of “sense,” or prudence and discretion, whose constancy toward her lover, Edward Ferrars, is rewarded by her marriage to him after some distressing vicissitudes.

Pride and Prejudice describes the clash between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich and aristocratic landowner. Although Austen shows them intrigued by each other, she reverses the convention of “first impressions”: “pride” of rank and fortune and “prejudice” against Elizabeth's inferiority of family hold Darcy aloof; while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the “pride” of self-respect and by “prejudice” against Darcy's snobbery. Ultimately, they come together in love and self-understanding. The intelligent and high-spirited Elizabeth was Jane Austen's own favourite among all her heroines and is one of the most engaging in English literature.

Northanger Abbey combines a satire on conventional novels of polite society with one on Gothic tales of terror. Catherine Morland, the unspoiled daughter of a country parson, is the innocent abroad who gains worldly wisdom: first in the fashionable society of Bath and then at Northanger Abbey itself, where she learns not to interpret the world through her reading of Gothic thrillers. Her mentor and guide is the self-assured and gently ironic Henry Tilney, her husband-to-be.

In the three novels of Jane Austen's maturity, the literary satire, though still present, is more subdued and is subordinated to the comedy of character and society.

Austen's second period of productivity began in 1811 after the publication of Sense and Sensibility. Following 12 disappointing and unproductive years, she produced in quick succession her last three novels: Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818). All three deal with the romantic entanglements of their strongly characterized heroines.

In its tone and discussion of religion and religious duty, Mansfield Park is the most serious of Austen's novels. The heroine, Fanny Price, is a self-effacing and unregarded cousin cared for by the Bertram family in their country house. Fanny emerges as a true heroine whose moral strength eventually wins her complete acceptance in the Bertram family and marriage to Edmund Bertram himself, after that family's disastrous involvement with the meretricious and loose-living Crawfords.

Of all Austen's novels, Emma is the most consistently comic in tone. It centres on Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman who indulges herself with meddlesome and unsuccessful attempts at matchmaking among her friends and neighbours. After a series of humiliating errors, a chastened Emma finds her destiny in marriage to the mature and protective George Knightley, a neighbouring squire who had been her mentor and friend.

Persuasion tells the story of a second chance, the reawakening of love between Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whom seven years earlier she had been persuaded not to marry. Now Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars with prize money and the social acceptability of naval rank; he is an eligible suitor acceptable to Anne's snobbish father and his circle, and Anne discovers the continuing strength of her love for him.

Several incomplete works were published long after Austen's death. These include The Watsons (1923), Fragment of a Novel (1925), and Plan of a Novel (1926). Her correspondence has also been published (Letters, 1932; revised edition 1952).

The works of Jane Austen, well received from their publication onward, are very different in style from the romanticism favored by her contemporaries. With penetrating observation and in meticulous detail, she presented the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English. Her characteristic theme was that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. Faults of character displayed by the people of her novels are corrected when, through tribulation, lessons are learned. Even the most minor characters are vividly particularized in Austen's lucid style. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior, Austen has been regarded by many critics as one of the greatest of all novelists.

Although the birth of the English novel is to be seen in the first half of the 18th century in the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, it is with Jane Austen that the novel takes on its distinctively modern character in the realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the unremarkable situations of everyday life. In her six novels— Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion —Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time, revealing the possibilities of “domestic” literature. Her repeated fable of a young woman's voyage to self-discovery on the passage through love to marriage focuses upon easily recognizable aspects of life. It is this concentration upon character and personality and upon the tensions between her heroines and their society that relates her novels more closely to the modern world than to the traditions of the 18th century. It is this modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style; her shrewd, amused sympathy; and the satisfaction to be found in stories so skillfully told, in novels so beautifully constructed that helps to explain her continuing appeal for readers of all kinds. Modern critics remain fascinated by the commanding structure and organization of the novels, by the triumphs of technique that enable the writer to lay bare the tragicomedy of existence in stories of which the events and settings are apparently so ordinary and so circumscribed.

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