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Jane Austen

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Jane Austen (16 December, 1775 – 18 July, 1817) was an English novelist whose work is considered part of the Western canon. Her insights into women's lives and her mastery of form and irony have made her one of the most noted and influential novelists of her era despite being only moderately successful during her lifetime.

Contents

Life

Jane Austen was born at the rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, in 1775, daughter to the Rev. George Austen (1731–1805) and his wife Cassandra (née Leigh) (1739–1827). She is one of the descendents of King Edward III of England. [link] She lived in the area for most of her life and never married. She had six brothers and one older sister, Cassandra, to whom she was very close. The only undisputed portrait of Jane Austen is a somewhat rudimentary coloured sketch done by Cassandra which resides in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Her brothers Frank and Charles went to sea, eventually becoming admirals. In 1783, she was educated briefly by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton. In 1785–1786, she was educated at the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire. In general, she received an education superior to that generally given to girls of her time, and took early to writing, beginning her first tale in 1789.

Jane Austen's family coat of arms (click on image for more information).
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Jane Austen's family coat of arms (click on image for more information).

Austen's life was relatively uneventful. In 1801 the family moved to Bath, the scene of many episodes in her writings (though Jane Austen, like her character Anne Elliot, seems to have "persisted in a disinclination for Bath"). In 1802 Austen received a marriage proposal from a wealthy but "big and awkward" man named Harris Bigg-Wither, who was six years her junior. Such a marriage would have "established" her (in the terminology of the day), and freed her from some of the constraints and "dependency" then associated with the role of a spinster who must rely on her family for support. Such considerations influenced her to at first accept his offer, but she then changed her mind the next day. It seems clear that she did not love him. It was events such as these that inspired one of her greatest novels, Pride and Prejudice. After the death of her father in 1805, Austen, her sister, and her mother lived in Southampton with her brother Frank and his family for several years until they moved in 1809 to Chawton. Here her wealthy brother Edward had an estate with a cottage, where he allowed his mother and sisters to live. Their house is now open to the public.

Austen continued to live a quiet life with her family. In 1816, she began to suffer from ill-health. It is now thought she may have suffered from Addison's disease, the cause of which was then unknown. Her disease had ups and downs, but in 1817 her condition became so serious that she travelled to Winchester. She died there two months later, and was buried in the cathedral.

Work

Adhering to contemporary convention for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously. Her novels achieved a measure of popular success and esteem, yet her anonymity kept her out of leading literary circles. Although all her works are love stories and although her career coincided with the Romantic movement in English literature, Jane Austen was no Romantic. Passionate emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel and the young woman who exercises rational moderation is more likely to find real happiness than one who elopes with a lover. Her artistic values had more in common with David Hume and John Locke than with her contemporaries William Wordsworth or Lord Byron. Among Austen's favourite influences were Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Samuel Richardson, George Crabbe, and Fanny Burney.

Her posthumously published novel Northanger Abbey satirizes the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, but Austen is most famous for her mature works, which took the form of socially astute comedies of manners. These, especially Emma, are often cited for their perfection of form, while modern critics continue to unearth new perspectives on Austen's keen commentary regarding the predicament of unmarried genteel English women in the late 1790s and early 1800s. Inheritance law and custom usually directed the bulk of a family's fortune to male heirs.

In 1816, the editors of this publication didn't think that Emma was one of the more important novels of the day.
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In 1816, the editors of this publication didn't think that Emma was one of the more important novels of the day.

Her novels were fairly well received when they were published, with Sir Walter Scott in particular praising her work:

"That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with."
Austen also earned the admiration of Macaulay (who thought that in the world there were no compositions which approached nearer to perfection), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Sydney Smith, and Edward FitzGerald. Nonetheless, she was a somewhat overlooked author for several decades following her death. Interest in her work revived during the late nineteenth century. Twentieth century scholars ranked her among the greatest talents in English letters, sometimes even comparing her to Shakespeare. Lionel Trilling and Edward Said were important Austen critics.

Trilling wrote in an essay on Mansfield Park,

"It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being. Never before had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. Hegel speaks of the "secularization of spirituality" as a prime characteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to tell us what this involves. She is the first novelist to represent society, the general culture, as playing a part in the moral life, generating the concepts of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" which no earlier time would have understood the meaning of, and which for us are so subtle that they defy definition, and so powerful that none can escape their sovereignty. She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anyonymous judgment to which we respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and styles to the question ..."
Negative views of Austen have been notable, with more demanding detractors frequently accusing her writing of being un-literary and middle-brow. Charlotte Brontë criticized the narrow scope of Austen's fiction:

"Anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as 'outré' or extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood ... What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores....Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman, if this is heresy--I cannot help it."
Mark Twain's reaction was revulsion:
"Jane Austen? Why, I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book."
Austen's literary strength lies in the delineation of character, especially of women, by delicate touches arising out of the most natural and everyday incidents in the life of the middle and upper classes, from which her subjects are generally taken. Her characters, though of quite ordinary types, are drawn with such firmness and precision, and with such significant detail as to retain their individuality intact through their entire development, and they are uncoloured by her own personality. Her view of life seems largely genial, with a strong dash of gentle but keen irony.

Some contemporary readers may find the world she describes, in which people's chief concern is obtaining advantageous marriages, unliberated and disquieting. In her era options were limited, and both women and men often married for financial considerations. Female writers worked within the similarly narrow genre of romance. Part of Austen's prominent reputation rests on how well she integrates observations on the human condition within a convincing love story. Much of the tension in her novels arises from balancing financial necessity against other concerns: love, friendship, and morals.

Bibliography

Novels

Shorter works

Juvenilia

Jane Austen today

Austen's work is today considered an important part of the English literary canon and is the subject of a massive body of scholarly and critical work. Sense and Sensibility has recently been held in high esteem by those studying the novel because of its representations of social structure and character development. The novels are also widely read in a non-academic setting, simply for pleasure.

Some of her unfinished and minor works have been published, starting in 1870 (before then, they were only known to her family). One of the houses she lived in during her stay in Bath, England is also a public museum, just south of the famous Bath Circus.

Filmography

In popular culture, Austen's novels have been adapted in a great number of film and television series, varying greatly in their faithfulness to the originals. Pride and Prejudice has been the most reproduced of her works, with six films, the most recent being the 2005 adaptation directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley, Donald Sutherland, Matthew Macfadyen, and Dame Judi Dench, as well as the 2004 Bollywood adaptation Bride & Prejudice. Previously, there were five television series produced by the BBC, the most noteworthy being the well-loved 1995 version, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. The 2001 film Bridget Jones's Diary included characters and plot line inspired by the novel.

Emma has been adapted to film five times: in 1932 with Marie Dressler and Jean Hersholt, a 1972 British television version, the 1995 teen film Clueless, in 1996 with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam, and also in 1996 on British television with Kate Beckinsale.

Sense and Sensibility has been made into four films including the 1995 version directed by Ang Lee and starring Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson (who won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay). Persuasion has been adapted into two television series and one feature film. Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey have both been made into films. The 1980 film Jane Austen in Manhattan is about rival film companies who wish to produce a film based on the only complete Austen play "Sir Charles Grandison" (from the Richardson novel of the same title), which was rediscovered in 1980.BBC News. 2004. [Rare Austen manuscript unveiled]

Notes

Further reading

Knox-Shaw, Peter. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN-10 0521843464

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: a life. Revised and updated edition. London: Penguin, 2000. ISBN-0140296905

External links

Works

Author information Fan sites & societies
Jane Austen's novels
Sense and Sensibility (1811) | Pride and Prejudice (1813) | Mansfield Park (1814) | Emma (1815) | Northanger Abbey (1818) | Persuasion (1818)

 

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