Jane Austen

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Jane Austen

1870 engraving of Jane Austen, based on a portrait drawn by her sister Cassandra.
Born: 16 December 1775
Steventon, Hampshire, England
Died: 18 July 1817
Winchester, Hampshire, England
Occupation: Novelist

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works include Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Emma. Her biting social commentary and masterful use of both free indirect discourse and irony eventually made Austen one of the most influential and revered novelists of the early nineteenth century.

Contents

[edit] Life

In 1775, Jane Austen was born at a rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, one of two daughters of the Rev. George Austen (1731–1805) and his wife Cassandra (née Leigh) (1739–1827). Her brothers James and Henry followed in the path of their father and joined the clergy (the latter towards the end of his life after a successful career as a banker), while Francis and Charles both pursued naval careers. There was also a disabled brother, George, who did not live with the Austens. She also had a sister, Cassandra, with whom she maintained a close relationship throughout her life. The abundant correspondence between the sisters provides historians with the greatest insight into Austen's past. It is to be regretted that Cassandra destroyed some of this correspondence after Jane's death and no one is certain why she chose to do this. The only undisputed portrait of Jane Austen is a somewhat rudimentary coloured sketch done by Cassandra, which currently resides in the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1783, she was educated briefly by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton, and finally in 1785–1786 attended the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire. She began her first novel in 1789. Her family life was also conducive to writing; the Austen family often enacted plays, which gave Jane an opportunity to present her stories. They also borrowed novels from the local library, which influenced Austen's writing. She was encouraged to write especially by her brother Henry, who wrote a little himself.

"Cottage" where Jane Austen lived during the last 8 years of her life (today a museum)
"Cottage" where Jane Austen lived during the last 8 years of her life (today a museum)

Jane Austen was born, lived, and wrote in the eighteenth century. During her lifetime, literature began to be influenced by Romanticism, where imagination, emotions, love for nature, and mystery are important. Although Jane Austen was a contemporary of romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, her novels are not romantic; instead she still belonged the age of reason and satire. The emphasis in her novels was on the manners of people in society, and she often criticized the snobbery of the British upper class, while upholding the ideals of self-control, reason, propriety, and etiquette in social manners.

The subject matter of Emma is marriage from a woman's point of view, but Jane Austen does not treat it romantically. Instead, she presents, in a very realistic manner, the problems which young women of marriageable age in her times faced. Since women were unable to have a career, Austen showed how women sought a comfortable home and economic security through marrying properly.

Marriage, for Jane Austen, is a means to study human and personal relationships. There are three proposals of marriage in the novel, and each of them reveals much about the characters involved. Robert Martin proposes to Harriet Smith through a letter, and she also declines in a letter. Elton's proposal to Emma is made in a carriage in the most conventional manner with his trying to be the adoring lover; Emma's bewilderment over the proposal, however, makes the moment very unromantic. Knightley's proposal of marriage to Emma is not a romantic expression of love, but a proposal that is marked with reason and common sense. Jane Austen knew her limitations. She could never write about the thrilling and exciting moments in a romantic way; instead, her interest was in psychologically analyzing the consciousness of her characters in common settings.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; it also saw the industrialization of England. Although Jane Austen knew about these historical and political events, she showed no interest in them, and they play no real part in her writing. Instead, she focuses on rural society and the relationship of people, writing with a limited scope. This is the world she knew, for she lived most of her life in Hampshire, in villages very similar to Highbury. Her love of this setting is very clear in Emma.


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

In 1801 the family moved to the socially esteemed spa city of Bath, which provides the setting for many of her novels.[1] However, Jane Austen, like her character Anne Elliot, seemed to have "persisted in a disinclination for Bath", although her dislike may have been influenced by the family's precarious financial situation and from being uprooted from her settled existence in the country. 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 freed her from some of the constraints and dependency then associated with the role of a spinster. Such considerations may have influenced her initially to accept his offer, only to change her mind and refuse him the following day. It seems clear that she did not love him. 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 before moving to Chawton in 1809. Here her wealthy brother Edward had an estate with a cottage, where he allowed his mother and sisters to live. This home is now a museum and is a popular site for tourists and literary pilgrims alike.

Austen lived at Chawton and wrote her later novels there. It wasn't until 1811, six years before her death, that her first novel, Sense and Sensibility was published, at the expense of her brother Henry and his wife Eliza. In 1816, she began to suffer from ill health. In May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be closer to her doctor. It is now thought by some that she may have suffered from Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands that was often caused by tuberculosis. The disease was at that time unnamed. Others, such as one of her biographers, Carol Shields, have hypothesized that she died from breast cancer. Jane's condition became increasingly unstable, and on 18 July 1817 she died at the age of forty-one and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

[edit] Work

Austen's best-known work is Pride and Prejudice, which is viewed as an exemplar of her socially astute comedies of manners. Austen also wrote a satire of the popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, which was published posthumously in 1818.

Adhering to a common contemporary practice for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously; her anonymity kept her out of leading literary circles.

Austen's comedies of manners, especially Emma, are often cited for their perfection of form. 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, a consequence of inheritance law and custom, which usually directed the bulk of a family's fortune to eldest male heirs.

Although Austen's career coincided with the Romantic movement in literature, she was not an intensely passionate Romantic. She was more neo-classical. Passionate emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel: the young woman who exercises twice a day is more likely to find real happiness than one who irrationally elopes with a capricious lover. Austen's artistic values had more in common with David Hume and John Locke than with her contemporaries William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. Among Austen's influences were Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, George Crabbe and Fanny Burney.

Although Austen did not promote passionate emotion as did other Romantic movement writers, she was also skeptical of its opposite -- excessive calculation and practicality often leads to disaster in Austen novels.

In 1816, the editors of the New Monthly Magazine didn't see Emma as an important novel.
In 1816, the editors of the New Monthly Magazine didn't see Emma as an important novel.

Jane loved to write her novels in peace and she only shared them with her family when they were performing plays.

[edit] Criticism

Austen's novels received only moderate renown when they were published, though Sir Walter Scott in particular praised 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." In Austen's final novel Persuasion, several characters read a work by Scott and praise it, but Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility had already counted Scott as one of her favorites.

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, Edward FitzGerald, and the Prince Regent, who even managed to get her to visit him at Brighton. Twentieth century scholars rank her among the greatest literary geniuses of the English language, sometimes even comparing her to Shakespeare. Lionel Trilling and Edward Said have both written treatises on Austen's works. Said referred extensively to Mansfield Park in his 1993 work, Culture and Imperialism.

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 anonymous 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 severe detractors frequently accusing her writing of being unliterary 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."

Rudyard Kipling felt differently, going so far as to write the short story "The Janeites" about a group of soldiers who were also Austen fans, as well as two poems praising "England's Jane" and providing her with posthumous true love.

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. During her time 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, honor and self-respect. It is also important to point out that, at the time, romance novels were seen as a clever modern variation on the knightly romances of medieval times; these were damsels engaged in adventure, seeking their fortunes and carrying out quests.

There are two museums dedicated to Jane Austen. The Jane Austen Centre in Bath is a public museum located in a Georgian House in Gay Street, just a few doors down the street from number 25 where Austen stayed in 1805. The Jane Austen's House Museum is located in Chawton cottage, in Hampshire, where Austen lived from 1809 to 1817.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Pride and Prejudice

See also List of artistic depictions of and related to Pride and Prejudice.

[edit] Emma

[edit] Sense and Sensibility

  • Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000), a contemporary Indian film set in the present, based on the same plot, starring Tabu as Sowmya (Elinor Dashwood), Aishwarya Rai as Meenakshi (Marianne Dashwood), with Ajit as Manohar (Edward Ferrars), Abbas as Srikanth (Willoughby) and Mammootty as Captain Bala (Colonel Brandon).
  • Sense and Sensibility (1995 film), film starring Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood, Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood, with Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars and Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon. Directed by Ang Lee, this film was hugely successful. Emma Thompson's Academy Award-winning screenplay took some liberties with Austen's story in the interests of a modern audience's requirements.
  • Sense and Sensibility (1981 TV serial), BBC series starring Irene Richard as Elinor Dashwood and Tracey Childs as Marianne Dashwood.
  • Sense and Sensibility (1971 TV serial), BBC series starring Joanna David as Elinor Dashwood and Ciaran Madden as Marianne Dashwood.

[edit] Persuasion

[edit] Mansfield Park

[edit] Northanger Abbey

  • Northanger Abbey (1986 film), based on the novel, directed by Giles Foster and released in 1986, starring Peter Firth in the role of Henry Tilney.
  • Northanger Abbey (2007 TV drama), based on the novel, directed by Jon Jones and released in 2007, starring Felicity Jones as heroine Catherine Morland and JJ Feilds as dashing Henry Tilney. This version is truer to the book than the 1986 film and omits less detail, whilst explaining social standings more fully.

[edit] Non-book based

  • The 1980 film Jane Austen in Manhattan is about rival stage companies who wish to produce the only complete Austen play "Sir Charles Grandison" (from the Richardson novel of the same title), which was rediscovered in 1980.[2]
  • A fanciful film of Jane Austen's life, Becoming Jane, appeared in 2007, with Anne Hathaway as Jane and directed by Julian Jarrold. The film is based around her factual romance with young Tom Lefroy, who later became Lord High Justice of Ireland, played by James McAvoy. Although it is based loosely around the few facts that are available from this period of her life, mainly from letters to her only sister Cassandra, it creates a lively portrait of the young Jane Austen and a romance worthy of any of her novels. This is Jane's chance to be the heroine and live a story worthy of her books.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Shorter works

[edit] Juvenilia

[edit] Further reading

  • Knox-Shaw, Peter. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0521843464
  • Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: a life. Revised and updated edition. London: Penguin, 2000. ISBN 0-14-029690-5
  • Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: A Family Record. 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-53417-8
  • My Dear Cassandra: The Letters of Jane Austen. Selected by Penelope Hughes-Hallett.
  • Jones, Darryl. Jane Austen. Palgrave Macmillan (22 Jul 2004) ISBN-13: 978-0333727430

[edit] External links

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[edit] Works

[edit] Author information

[edit] Fan sites and societies

[edit] Miscellaneous

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


Persondata
NAME Austen, Jane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION English novelist
DATE OF BIRTH 16 December 1775
PLACE OF BIRTH Steventon, Hampshire, England
DATE OF DEATH 18 July 1817
PLACE OF DEATH Winchester, Hampshire, England
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