1873 engraving of Jane Austen, based on a portrait drawn by her sister Cassandra.
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose
works include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park,
Emma, Northanger Abbey, and
Persuasion. Her social commentary and masterful use of both free indirect speech and irony eventually made Austen one of the
most influential and honoured novelists in English literature. Her novels were all
written and set around Regency Era. She never married and died at age 41.
Life
Family and Education
Jane Austen was born December 16th, 1775 at a Church of England (Anglican) rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, one of two daughters of the
Reverend George Austen (1731 – 1805) and his wife Cassandra (née Leigh) (1739 – 1827).
Two of her brothers, James and Henry, followed in their father's path and joined the Anglican clergy (the latter towards the end of his life after a successful career as a banker), while two
other brothers Francis and Charles both pursued naval careers. A fifth brother, George,
had a disability, and did not live with the family. Austen’s sister was named Cassandra, like their mother, and Austen tended to follow this naming practice in her novels, \
The abundant correspondence between the sisters provides historians with the greatest insight into her thoughts. However,
Cassandra destroyed many of the letters after Austen’s death. Cassandra drew the only undisputed life portrait of Austen, a
somewhat rudimentary coloured sketch that currently resides in the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1783,
Austen was educated briefly by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton; finally, from 1785–1786,
she attended the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire.
Writing
Austen began writing her first novel in 1789. Her family life was conducive to writing; the
Austen family often enacted plays, which gave her an opportunity to present her stories. They also borrowed novels from the local
library, which influenced her writing. She was encouraged to write, especially by her brother, Henry, who wrote a little himself.
The theme of Austen's stories centered upon the limited provincial world in which she lived for the first twenty-six years of her
life. Jane loved to write her novels in peace and she only shared them with her family when they were performing plays. It was
not until 1811, six years before her death, that a novel she had written, Sense and Sensibility, was published, and it was
at the expense of her brother, Henry, and his wife, Eliza.
Romances
Although she never married, Austen experienced at least two potential romances in her short life. In 1796, Austen had a flirtation with Tom Lefroy, later Lord High
Justice of Ireland, who was the younger relative of a friend. She wrote two letters to Cassandra
mentioning him. In a letter dated 9 January 1796, she wrote:
- "After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very
well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove—it is that his morning
coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom
Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded".
On 16 January 1796, there is another mention:
- "Friday. -- At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be
over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea".[1]
It does not seem to have been a serious relationship and the love affair did not last long. However, it has been suggested
that Austen might have had him in mind when she created the character Mr. Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice.
In 1802, Austen received a marriage proposal from a wealthy, but "big and awkward" man named Harris Bigg-Wither, the younger
brother of her friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg, and six years her junior.[2] The marriage would have freed her from some of the constraints and dependency she experienced as a
spinster. She initially accepted his offer, only to change her mind and refuse him the following day.
Later Life and Death
The Jane Austen Centre, Bath
In 1801, following her father's retirement, the family moved to the fashionable spa city of
Bath, which provided the setting for many of her novels.[3] However, Austen, like her character Anne Elliot, seemed to have "persisted in a
disinclination for Bath." Her dislike may have been influenced by the family's precarious financial situation and from being
uprooted from her settled existence in the country.
"Chawton Cottage" where Jane Austen lived during the last eight years of her life (today a museum).
Austen’s father died in 1805, and she, Cassandra, and their mother moved to Southampton. They lived there with Austen’s brother, Frank, and his family for several years,
before moving to Chawton in 1809. In Chawton Austen’s wealthy brother Edward had an
estate with a cottage, where the three women lived. Austen wrote her later novels there,
and the cottage is now a museum.
In 1816, Austen began to suffer from ill health. In May 1817, she moved to Winchester to be closer to her doctor. Her
condition worsened, and on 18 July 1817, she died at the age of
forty-one and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. When asked by Cassandra if there
were anything she wanted, Austen responded with her last words: “Nothing, but death”.
It is now thought by some that Austen may have suffered from Addison's disease, a
failure of the adrenal glands that was common in the 19th century because it is a frequent
complication of tuberculosis. The disease was at that time unnamed. Others, such as
biographer Carol Shields, have hypothesized that she died from breast cancer.
Works
England's first truly important female novelist, Jane Austen had difficulty in establishing a reputation for herself, despite
the fact that she counted the Prince Regent among her admirers of the
time. A novelist of manners, her work dealt with a limited social circle in society—that of the provincial gentry and the upper
classes. As she stated in a letter to her niece, Anna: 'Three of four families in a country village are the very thing to work
on.' She explored their relationships, values and shortcomings with detachment and irony, and her restrained satire of social
excesses of the period was perhaps nearer to the classically minded moralizing of the eighteenth century than to the new age of
Romantic rebellion and potential sentimentalism.[4]
Austen's best-known work is Pride and Prejudice, which is viewed as an
exemplar of her socially astute novel of manners. Pride and Prejudice went into three printings during her lifetime. 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; this kept her out of leading literary
circles.
Austen's novels 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 and the social turbulence of early nineteenth-century England was barely touched upon in novels
which concentrated on the everyday life and ostensibly trivial aspects of genteel society—balls, trips, dances, and an unending
procession of marriage proposals. Thus, it could be argued she was more neo-classical in outlook. 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.
Within her limited field, however, she did create a memorable range of characters whose dealings with love, marriage,
courtship and social or personal rivalries were treated with a remarkable degree of objectivity and psychological depth. Although
Austen did not promote passionate emotion as did other Romantic movement writers, she was also sceptical of its
opposite—excessive calculation and practicality often leads to disaster in Austen novels (for example, Maria Bertram's marriage
of convenience to the wealthy but dull Mr. Rushworth has an unhappy conclusion). Her close analysis of character displayed both a
warm sense of humour and a hardy realism: vanity, selfishness and a lack of self-knowledge are among the faults most severely
judged in her novels (e.g. in the case of Wickham and the flighty Lydia in Pride and Prejudice).
Literary Influences
Among Austen's influences were Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, George Crabbe and Fanny Burney.
Austen owed much in particular to both Richardson and Fielding with regard to her concept of the novel. Her first work, Elinor and Marianne, (later
modified and published as Sense and Sensibility) was epistolary in technique.
Her choice of a third-person omniscient narrator showed the influence of Fielding but, unlike the latter, she did not allow the
narrator to intrude so much during the course of the story. Indeed, direct comments on the part of the narrator are rare, Austen
preferring to let subtle nuance and dialogue illuminate her attitude to the characters and unfolding events. Verbal and
situational irony are frequently combined with superbly structured dialogues to reinforce
judgments which would otherwise have to be made explicitly. Criticized for being repetitive, her plots are nonetheless well
structured, and reveal a sincere love of perfection and minutiae of detail that she believed was one of the prerogatives of any
potential writer.[5]
Criticism
In 1816, the editors of the
New Monthly Magazine did not see
Emma as an important
novel.
Austen's novels received only moderate renown when they were published, with some seeing her novels "as overtly
moral,"[6] although 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."[7] 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 told his librarian to give her a guided tour of his London residence Carlton House's library. He also gave
"permission" (effectively a command) for Emma to be dedicated to him. 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, and 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 ..."
Trilling's essay has attracted much subsequent literary discussion as well.[8][9][10]
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 also negative:
- "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."
- "When I take up one of Jane Austen's books,... such as Pride and Prejudice, I feel like a barkeeper entering the
kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he
would probably say so."
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 keep 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 securing 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 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.
Bibliography
Novels
In order of first publication:
Shorter works
Juvenilia
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Filmography
In popular culture, Austen's novels have been adapted in a number of film and television series, varying greatly in their faithfulness to the originals.
Pride and Prejudice
Film
Television
Adaptations
See also List of artistic depictions of
and related to Pride and Prejudice.
Emma
Film
Television
Adaptation
Sense and Sensibility
Film
Television
Adaptation
- Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000), a contemporary Kollywood (Tamil) 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).
Persuasion
Film
Television
Mansfield Park
Film
- Mansfield Park (film) 1999 film directed by the Canadian Patricia
Rozema, and starring Frances O'Connor, Embeth Davidtz, Sheila Gish and Harold Pinter.
Television
Adaptation
- Metropolitan (1990 film) a loose adaptation set in modern day
Manhattan and Long Island. Written and directed
by Whit Stillman, and starring Edward Clements, Carolyn
Farina, Taylor Nichols, and Chris Eigeman (Jane
Austen is also mentioned throughout the film.)
Northanger Abbey
Film
Television
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.[11]
- Another 2007 semi-biographical film, this one produced by the BBC for television, Miss Austen Regrets. It focuses on the last few years of Austen's life, in which she looks back
on her life and loves. Jane Austen is played by Olivia Williams.
- The 2007 film The Jane Austen Book Club is about a group of people
who form a Jane Austen discussion group. Much of the dialogue concerns her novels and her personal life.
Plays and Musicals
- First Impressions (1959), a Broadway musical adaptation of Pride and
Prejudice
- "JANE, the musical" debuted in June 2006 in the West Midlands, UK. It is a West-end style musical theatre production based on
the life of Jane Austen. The musical, directed by Geetika Lizardi, focuses on Austen as a modern heroine, a woman who chose art
and integrity over the security of a loveless marriage.
- Emma, A New Musical (2007) based on the
novel "Emma"
References
- ^ Letters of Jane Austen, available online: [1]. Retrieved
5/14/07.
- ^ Harris Bigg-Wither 1781-1833
- ^ The Jane Austen Centre website celebrates her time in Bath.
- ^ Words, Words, Words, English Literature: The Romantics and the
Victorians, La Spiga languages, 2003
- ^ Words, Words, Words, English Literature: The Romantics and the
Victorians, La Spiga languages, 2003
- ^ Teaching Comedy in Jane Austen's Works: A Sample Syllabus
- ^ Criticisms and Interpretations
- ^ "The Charm is Broken":
Sexual Desire and Transgression in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
- ^ Trilling on Mansfield Park
- ^ A Reading of "Mansfield Park": An Essay in Critical Synthesis, Review author[s: A. Walton Litz
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1968 University of California Press]
- ^ BBC News. 2004. Rare Austen manuscript
unveiled
Further reading
- Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. Max Press 2007 ISBN 978 1 904435 81 5
- Bautz, Annika. Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study. Continuum, 2007. ISBN
0-826-49546-X, ISBN-13 978-0826495464
- Bagchi, Barnita. 'Instruction a Torment?: Jane Austen’s Early Writing and Conflicting Versions of Female Education in
Romantic-Era ‘Conservative’ British Women’s Novels’, Romanticism on the Net, 2005 [2]
- 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
- Richard Handler, Daniel A. Segal Hierarchies of Choice: The Social Construction of Rank in Jane Austen American Ethnologist, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Nov., 1985), pp. 691-706
- 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
- Nokes, David. Jane Austen. Fourth Estate, 1998. ISBN-10 1857026675, ISBN-13 978-1857026672
- Daniel A. Segal, Richard Handler Serious Play: Creative Dance and Dramatic Sensibility in Jane Austen, Ethnographer
Man, New Series, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1989), pp. 322-339 doi:10.2307/2803309
- Shields, Carol, Jane Austen (Penguin Lives). Viking Penguin, 2001. ISBN: 0143035169.
- Smith, Lori, A Walk with Jane Austen. WaterBrook, 2007. ISBN: 978-1400073702
- Southam, Brian, Jane Austen and the Navy, London, National Maritime Museum, new edn 2005. ISBN: 0948065656
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