A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Jane Austen. English writer, who first gave the novel its modern character through the treatment of everyday life. Although Austen was widely read in her lifetime, she published her works anonymously. The most urgent preoccupation of her bright, young heroines is courtship and finally marriage. Austen herself never married. 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. In 1775, Jane Austen was born at the rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, one of two daughters of the Rev. George Austen (1731–1805) and his wife Cassandra (1739–1827). The daughter of a clergyman, she spent the first 25 years of her life at “Steventon,” her father’s Hampshire vicarage. Here her first novels, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey, were written, although they were not published until much later. The Austens were a very close-knit family; Jane had six brothers and one sister, Cassandra, who would later draw a famous portrait of Jane. They lived in the village of Steventon in Hampshire county, England, where George was rector. Jane Austen was mostly tutored at home, and irregularly at the Abbey School in Reading, Berkshire, but she received a broader education than many women of her time. She started to write for family amusement as a child. Her parents were avid readers; Austen's own favorite poet was Cowper. Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787. Very shy about her writing, she wrote on small pieces of paper that she slipped under the desk plotter if anyone came into the room. In her letters she observed the daily life of her family and friends in an intimate and gossipy manner. Jane was inseparable from her older sister Cassandra. They sang and danced and attended balls together. The abundant correspondence between the sisters provides historians with the greatest insight into Austen's past. Her brothers James and Henry followed in the path of their father and joined the clergy, while Francis and Charles both pursued naval careers. Rev. George Austen supported his daughter's writing aspirations, bought her paper and a writing desk, and tried to help her get a publisher. The Austen family often enacted plays, which gave Jane an opportunity to present her stories. They also rented novels out of the local library, even though this was unseeming at that time, which influenced Austen's writings. She was encouraged to write especially by her brother Henry, who wrote a little himself. When George retired around 1801, he moved his family to Bath where he died in 1805. Adjusting to the ensuing financial difficulties, Jane, Cassandra and their mother then moved to Southampton for a time before settling in a cottage on the estate of Edward Austen in the village of Chawton, Hampshire in July 1809. This was the place where Austen felt at home and where she wrote her later novels. She never married, she never had a room of her own, but her social life was active and she had suitors and romantic dreams. With Tom Lefroy, whom she met a few times in 1796, she talked about Fielding's Tom Jones. They shared similar sense of ironic humour and Austen was undeniably attracted to him. Austen's sister Cassandra also never married. One of her brothers became a clergyman, two served in the navy, one was mentally retarded. He was taken care of a local family. Although all her works are love stories, and although her career coincided with the Romantic movement in literature, Jane Austen was not an intensely passionate Romantic. Passionate emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel and the young woman who exercises moderation is more likely to find real happiness than one who irrationally elopes with a capricious lover. Northanger Abbey, a satire on the Gothic novels of The novels published in Austen’s lifetime were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). Persuasion was issued in 1818 with Northanger Abbey. The author’s name did not appear on any of her title pages, and although her own friends knew of her authorship, she received little public recognition in her lifetime. Emma was written in comic tone. Austen begun the novel in January 1814 and completed it in March of the next year. The book was published in three volumes. It told the story of Emma Woodhouse, who finds her destiny in marriage. Emma is a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman. She is left alone with her hypochondriac father. Her governess, Miss Taylor, marries a neighbor, Mr. Weston. Emma has too much time and she spends it choosing proper partners for her friends and neighbors - blind to her own feelings. She makes a protégée of Harriet Smith, an illegitimate girl of no social status and tries to manipulate a marriage between Harriet and Mr. Elton, a young clergyman, who has set his sight on Emma. Emma has feelings about Mr. Weston's son. When Harriet becomes interested in George Knightley, a neighboring squire who has been her friend, Emma starts to understand her own limitations. He has been her moral adviser, and secretly loves her. Finally Emma finds her destiny in marriage with him. Harriet, who is left to decide for herself, marries Robert Martin, a young farmer. 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. Austen had rejected suitor Harris Bigg Wither at the last minute and never ended up marrying, but still she expresses a keen grasp of the traditional female role and the ensuing hopes and heartbreaks with her memorable protagonists including Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price, Catherine Morland, Anne Elliot, and Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice. Writing in the romantic vein, Austen was also a realist and has been lauded for her form and structure of plot and intensely detailed characters who struggle with the issues of class-consciousness versus individualism. 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. 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. Jane Austen’s novels are comedies of manners that depict the self-contained world of provincial ladies and gentlemen. Most of her works revolve around the delicate business of providing husbands for marriageable daughters. Jane Austen focused on middle-class provincial life with humor and understanding. She depicted minor landed gentry, country clergymen and their families, in which marriage mainly determined women's social status. Austen is particularly noted for her vivid delineations and lively interplay of character, her superb sense of comic irony, and her moral firmness. She ridicules the silly, the affected, and the stupid, ranging in her satire from light portraiture in her early works to more scornful exposures in her later novels. Her writing was subjected to the most careful polishing. She was quite aware of her special excellences and limitations, comparing herself to a miniaturist. Her minor works include her Juvenilia, the novel Lady Susan, and the fragments The Watsons and Sanditon. 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. The novels are also widely read in a non-academic setitbusng, simply for pleasure. Although Austen had many critics, among them Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain and Lionel Trilling, she also had many admirers during her life and since, including the Prince Regent, Andrew Lang, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, and Sir Walter Scott. 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, 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, though it is to be noted that this movie was based on a novel by Helen Fielding. Emma has been adapted on television several times, first in 1948. 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. In 1816, Jane Austen began to suffer from ill-health. In May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be closer to her doctor. It is now thought she may have suffered from Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands that was often caused by tuberculosis. Her condition became increasingly unstable, and on July 18, 1817 she died at the age of forty one and lies buried in the north aisle of the nave in Winchester Cathedral in Winchester, England. At her death Austen was writing the unfinished Sanditon, that was published in 1925. She managed to write twelve chapters before stopping in March 18, due to her poor health. Jane Austen's brother Henry made her authorship public after her death. It was not until the publication of J.E. Austen-Leigh's Memoir in 1870 that a Jane Austen cult began to develop. |
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