DISCOVERING JANE AUSTEN

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  18^th 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