How to Study a Jane Austen Novel

Palgrave Study Guides: Literature

by Vivien Jones

However much students enjoy their reading of a Jane Austen novel, many find it difficult to know how to organise their critical responses. This book shows students how to develop a firm grasp of Jane Austen's characters, themes and techniques, as well as such central topics as the use of irony in the novels, and their style and moral patterning. In the newly revised and expanded edition of this successful book, Vivien Jones looks at all of Jane Austen's novels, and demonstrates how to analyse both their overall structure and concerns as well as individual passages. A completely new chapter looks at current critical debates about Austen's achievement and the final chapter gives practical advice on writing an essay.

Genres: Literary Criticism

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 1987

About the author

Vivien Jones is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Gender and Culture at Leeds University, where she is also Pro-Vice Chancellor for Student Education.
Vivien held a Junior Research Fellowship at the Hall soon after it became a mixed college. Her first book centred on Henry James, but after moving to Leeds in 1983 her research and publications have focused on issues of gender and writing in the eighteenth century.
Her collection of primary documents, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (Routledge, 1990) has become a widely-used textbook both in the UK and in the US. She has also edited a collection of specially commissioned essays entitled Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Key issues in her research include narratives of sexuality and representations of the figure of the prostitute in eighteenth century fictional and non-fictional texts, and the cultural significance of conduct writing. She has also edited Frances Burney’s Evelina for the Oxford World’s Classics series.
Her publications on Mary Wollstonecraft include a memorial lecture at the 1997 BSECS conference, The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, and an essay on Mary Wollstonecraft and the Literature of Advice and Instruction in the Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
More recently she has focused on Jane Austen, with an edition of Austen’s Selected Letters which came out from the Oxford World’s Classics series, and a volume on Austen for OUP’s Authors in Context series.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is written like a first person GCSE essay. ‘ I know want to look at…. What I will talk about next is…’
There are some valid points but this extremely basic and not well laid out or designed. I expected this is be a discussion of Jane Austen’s novels and how to read them, maybe in terms of motif, theme, style etc, but it focused on the main 6 novels and one or two themes then onto very simple essay questions.
This was a library book previously and it was totally unspoilt and unused it is easy to understand why.