Jane Austen was an English novelist whose rigorous
literary craftsmanship, subtle irony, and insights into women's lives have
greatly influenced the development of the English novel.
She was born on
16 December 1775, in the village of Steventon, in the county of
Hampshire in Southern England. The seventh of eight children of the Reverend
George Austen and his wife, Cassandra, she was educated mainly at
home and never lived away from her family. She
had a happy childhood among all her brothers and the other boys who lodged with
the family and whom Mr Austen tutored. From her older sister, Cassandra, she
was inseparable.
As a young woman,
she enjoyed dancing at local balls, walking in the Hampshire countryside and
visiting friends. It was this world - of the
minor landed gentry, in the village, the neighbourhood, and the country town,
with occasional visits to Bath and to London - that she was to use in the
settings, characters, and subject matter of her novels.
Jane Austen’s lively and affectionate family circle provided
a stimulating context for her writing. She was an avid
reader. She read both the serious and the popular literature of the day. She was very familiar with 18th century novels, including
the works of Richardson and Fielding.
In Jane Austen's era, novels were often depreciated as trash;
Coleridge's opinion was that "where the reading of novels prevails as a
habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the
mind". Yet Jane Austen once wrote
in a letter that she and her family were "great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so"; moreover in her novel Northanger Abbey she gave her "Defence of the Novel", even though
she was also making fun of the falseness to real
life of many novels of the era throughout Northanger Abbey.
Jane
Austen started writing in her early teens. Her earliest works included
parodies of the literature of the day
and were originally written for the
amusement of her relatives and family friends.
At the age of 14 she wrote her first novel, Love and Freindship (sic) and then A History of England by a partial,
prejudiced and ignorant Historian. In her early twenties Jane Austen wrote
the novels that were later to be re-worked and published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger
Abbey. She also began a novel called The Watsons which was never
completed.
In 1801 the family moved away to
Bath. Mr Austen gave the Steventon living to his son James and retired to Bath
with his wife and two daughters. The next four years were difficult ones for
Jane. She disliked the confines of a busy town and missed her Steventon
life. The lifestyle that her family enjoyed there is very accurately portrayed
in her novels which contain finely observed and recorded snapshots of the
particular stratum of English society in which the Austen family lived.
In 1802, Jane Austen,
at the age of 27, received a marriage proposal from a wealthy young man named
Harris Bigg-Wither, whom she first accepted, but then refused the next day.
Having refused this offer of marriage, she subsequently never married.
After her father's death in
1805, his widow and daughters suffered financial difficulties and were
forced to rely on the charity of the Austen sons. The family moved away from
Bath in 1806, first to Clifton, and then to Southampton on the south coast of
England. They remained less than three years in Southampton before moving to
Chawton, near Salisbury in Hampshire, where Jane was to spend the rest of her
life. It was a small but comfortable house, with a pretty garden, and
most importantly it provided the settled home which Jane needed in order
to write.
In the seven and a half years that she lived in
the Chawton house, Jane Austen revised Sense
and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and published them (in 1811 and 1813)
and then embarked on a period of intense productivity. Mansfield Park came out in 1814, followed by Emma in 1816 and she completed Persuasion (which was published together with Northanger Abbey in 1818, the year after her death).
None of the books published in her life-time had her name on them — they were
described as being written "By a Lady". In the winter of 1816 she
started Sanditon, but
illness prevented its completion.
Jane Austen had contracted Addisons Disease, a
tubercular disease of the kidneys. No longer able to walk far, she used to
drive out in a little donkey carriage which can still be seen at the Jane
Austen Museum at Chawton. By May 1817 she went to Winchester in search of medical attention. Tragically,
there was then no cure and she died on 18 July 1817. She was 41 years old. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral.
Jane
Austen‘s brilliantly witty, elegantly structured fiction marked the transition
in English literature from 18th century Neoclassicism to 19th century
Romanticism.
She
started to write at a time when the Romantic Movement was
expressing its passionate involvement with the landscape, in particular, the
melancholic aspects of Gothic ruins. She was one of the few writers to
adopt an irreverent attitude to this obsession - her posthumously
published novel Northanger Abbey satirizes the immensely popular Gothic
novels of Ann
Radcliffe.
Writing during
the golden age of Romanticism, when stories of fantastical happenings and
extraordinary passion were the norm, Jane Austen stands out as remarkably unsentimental
and realistic. Due to this, she has much more in common with her immediate
predecessors, the realists of the 18th century such as Jonathan
Swift and Daniel Defoe.
Jane Austen
was a master of irony, and her novels are unequalled for their
astute observations, sophisticated dialogue, realism and complexity of
characters. Her novels typically focus on the lives of intelligent heroines
embedded in family life who unmask falsity and pretension on the ultimate path
to successful matrimony. Although modern readers may find that social rank
plays an excessive role in social, and particularly marital attachments,
qualities of character take precedence in Jane Austen's fiction.
Romantic
passion and sentiment are, on the contrary, emotions usually subdued in a Jane Austen novel. In
her fiction the young woman who exercises rational
moderation is more likely to find real happiness than the one who elopes with a
lover. This anti-romantic realism is evident in Austen's own literary tastes.
In her few surviving letters that describe her literary interests, she
expresses her admiration for the philosophers David
Hume and John Locke over her contemporaries William
Wordsworth and Lord Byron. In addition to Hume and Locke, her favourite
writers were Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, and Fanny Burney.
Jane
Austen's works were generally well-received by her contemporaries. As Sir
Walter Scott wrote in 1846, “that young lady had a talent for
describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which
is to me the most wonderful I ever met with … the exquisite touch which renders
ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the
description and the sentiment is denied to me”.
Andrew Trollope was also an admirer of Jane Austen's work and remarked, “Miss Austen was
surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as
it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class
of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her
as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally mean when we speak of
romance - she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures
there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us
nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us
while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women,
and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; - and,
certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which
the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy
of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her”.
Not every reader
has responded positively to Jane Austen, however. Probably the most famous
rejection of Jane Austen was written by Charlotte Bronte. In a letter to George Lewes in 1848, she described
Pride and Prejudice as “an accurate daguerrotyped [photographed] portrait of a commonplace
face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and
delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country,
no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck [stream]. I should hardly like to
live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These
observations will probably irritate you. but I shall run the risk . . . Now I
can understand admiration of George Sand . . . she has a grasp of mind which,
if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply respect: she is sagacious and
profound; Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant”.
Not all
readers agree with Bronte, however, that her novels lack emotion. For Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen was "a mistress of much
deeper emotion than appears on the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is
not there."
One of the most frequent criticisms of Jane Austen is the narrowness
of her subject matter. Her characters' interests and her own interests may seem
insignificant, unimportant, particularly since she wrote at a time when England
was engaged in a life and death struggle with the French and Napoleon. Though
she focused on the everyday lives and concerns of a few families in a small
country circle, her novels still have a profound effect on many readers. Lord David Cecil offered one way to resolve this paradox; Jane Austen's “is a profound vision. There are other views of life
and more extensive; concerned as it is exclusively with personal relationships,
it leaves out several important aspects of experience. But on her own ground
Jane Austen gets to the heart of the matter; her graceful unpretentious
philosophy, founded as it is on an unwavering recognition of fact, directed by
an unerring perception of moral quality, is as impressive as those of the most
majestic novelists.”
"We read Austen because she seems to know us
better than we know ourselves, and she seems to know us so intimately for the
simple reason that she helped determine who we are both as readers and as human
beings."
~ Harold Bloom
"For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of
life are contained in the microcosm of family, that personal relationships
prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta Stone of
literature."
~ Anna Quindlen
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