The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was the sixth child out of seven, born in the rectory of Steventon, Hampshire. Her father was the rector. Her mother's father was also a clergyman. She was encourage by her family and read widely as a child. They also encouraged her writing. She never married. She did, however, accept one suitor only to turn him down the following morning.

Her fiction closely portrays the class in which she was born. It contains subtle psychological analysis and caustic humor. Her novels were written in an order that differs from publication dates. She is said to occupy a unique place in English literary history as she is viewed as the writer who paved the way for the novel to be further developed in the 19th century.

BIOGRAPHY

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, the Hampshire village of Steventon, England where her father, the Reverend George Austen, was rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight—six boys and two girls. Her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister, Cassandra; neither Jane nor Cassandra married. Their father was a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. His wife, Cassandra (née Leigh), was a woman of ready wit, famed for her impromptu verses and stories. The great family amusement was acting.

Jane Austen’s lively and affectionate family circle provided a stimulating context for her writing. Moreover, her experience was carried far beyond Steventon rectory by an extensive network of relationships by blood and friendship. It was this world—of the minor landed gentry and the country clergy, in the village, the neighborhood, and the country town, with occasional visits to Bath and to London—that she was to use in the settings, characters, and subject matter of her novels.

Her earliest known writings date from about 1787, and between then and 1793 she wrote a large body of material that has survived in three manuscript notebooks: Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third. These contain plays, verses, short novels, and other prose and show Austen engaged in the parody of existing literary forms, notably the genres of the sentimental novel and sentimental comedy. Her passage to a more serious view of life from the exuberant high spirits and extravagances of her earliest writings is evident in Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel written about 1793–94 which was not published until 1871. This portrait of a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction is, in effect, a study of frustration and of woman’s fate in a society that has no use for her talents.

In 1802 it seems likely that Jane agreed to marry Harris Bigg-Wither, the 21-year-old heir of a Hampshire family, but the next morning changed her mind. There are also a number of mutually contradictory stories connecting her with someone with whom she fell in love but who died very soon after. Since Austen’s novels are so deeply concerned with love and marriage, there is some point in attempting to establish the facts of these relationships. Unfortunately, the evidence is unsatisfactory and incomplete. Cassandra was a jealous guardian of her sister’s private life, and after Jane’s death she censored the surviving letters, destroying many and cutting up others. But Jane Austen’s own novels provide indisputable evidence that their author understood the experience of love and of love disappointed.

The earliest of her novels published during her lifetime, Sense and Sensibilityy, was begun about 1795 as a novel-in-letters called “Elinor and Marianne,” after its heroines. Between October 1796 and August 1797 Austen completed the first version of Pride and PrejudicePride and Prejudice, then called “First Impressions.” In 1797 her father wrote to offer it to a London publisher for publication, but the offer was declined. Northanger Abbey, the last of the early novels, was written about 1798 or 1799, probably under the title “Susan.” In 1803 the manuscript of “Susan” was sold to the publisher Richard Crosby for £10. He took it for immediate publication, but, although it was advertised, unaccountably it never appeared.

Up to this time the tenor of life at Steventon rectory had been for Jane Austen’s growth as a novelist. This stable environment ended in 1801, however, when George Austen, then age 70, retired to Bath with his wife and daughters. For eight years Jane had to put up with a succession of temporary lodgings or visits to relatives, in Bath, London, Clifton, Warwickshire, and, finally, Southampton, where the three women lived from 1805 to 1809. In 1804 Jane began The Watsons but soon abandoned it. In 1804 her dearest friend, Mrs. Anne Lefroy, died suddenly, and in January 1805 her father died in Bath.

Eventually, in 1809, Jane’s brother Edward was able to provide his mother and sisters with a large cottage in the village of Chawton, within his Hampshire estate, not far from Steventon. The prospect of settling at Chawton had already given Jane Austen a renewed sense of purpose, and she began to prepare Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice for publication. She was encouraged by her brother Henry, who acted as go-between with her publishers. She was probably also prompted by her need for money. Two years later Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility, which came out, anonymously, in November 1811. Both of the leading reviews, the Critical Review and the Quarterly Review, welcomed its blend of instruction and amusement.

Meanwhile, in 1811 Austen had begun Mansfield Park, which was finished in 1813 and published in 1814. By then she was an established, though anonymous, author; Egerton had published Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, and later that year there were second editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice seems to have been the fashionable novel of its season. Between January 1814 and March 1815 she wrote Emma, which appeared in December 1815. In 1816 there was a second edition of Mansfield Park, published, like Emma, by Lord George Gordon Byron’s publisher, John Murray. Persuasion (written August 1815–August 1816) was published posthumously, with Northanger Abbey, in December 1817.

The years after 1811 seem to have been the most rewarding of her life. She had the satisfaction of seeing her work in print and well reviewed and of knowing that the novels were widely read. They were so much enjoyed by the prince regent, later Gorge IV, that he had a set in each of his residences, and Emma, at a discreet royal command, was “respectfully dedicated” to him. The reviewers praised the novels for their morality and entertainment, admired the character drawing, and welcomed the domestic realism as a refreshing change from the romanitc melodrama then in vogue.

For the last 18 months of her life, Austen was busy writing. Early in 1816, at the onset of her fatal illness, she set down the burlesque Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters (first published in 1871). Until August 1816 she was occupied with Persuasion, and she looked again at the manuscript of “Susan” (Northanger Abbey).

In January 1817 she began Sanditon, a robust and self-mocking satire on health resorts and invalidism. This novel remained unfinished because of Austen’s declining health. She supposed that she was suffering from bile, but the symptoms make possible a modern clinical assessment that she was suffering from Addison disease. Her condition fluctuated, but in April she made her will, and in May she was taken to Winchester, Hampshire to be under the care of an expert surgeon. She died on July 18, and six days later she was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Her authorship was announced to the world at large by her brother Henry, who supervised the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. There was no recognition at the time that regency England had lost its keenest observer and sharpest analyst; no understanding that a miniaturist (as she maintained that she was and as she was then seen), a “merely domestic” novelist, could be seriously concerned with the nature of society and the quality of its culture; no grasp of Jane Austen as a historian of the emergence of regency society into the modern world. During her lifetime there had been a solitary response in any way adequate to the nature of her achievement: Sir Walter Scott’s review of Emma in the Quarterly Review for March 1816, where he hailed this “nameless author” as a masterful exponent of “the modern novel” in the new realist tradition. After her death, there was for long only one significant essay, the review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in the Quarterly for January 1821 by the theologian Richard Wately. Scott’s and Whately’s essays provided the foundation for serious criticism of Jane Austen: their insights were appropriated by critics throughout the 19th century. (Copied from Encyclopedia Britannica .)

ADDITIONAL BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

There is more biographical information on Jane Austen on janeausten.org and biography.com

AUTHOR'S BIBLIOGRAPHY

A list of Austen’s writings are listed here.

FURTHER READING

ARTICLES

The Economics of Jane Austen

Book clinic: recommended literary page-turners

WEBSITES

Jane Austen Society of North America

JaneAusten.org

George Eliot wrote of Austen:

'They show us too much of the littlenesses and trivialities of life, and limit themselves so scrupulously to the sayings and doings of dull, ignorant, and disagreeable people, that their very truthfulness makes us yawn.'

Charlotte Bronte wrote that she found Austen’s portrait of life in Pride and Prejudice to be like a photograph of ‘a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers — but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy — no open country — no fresh air — no blue hill — no bonny beck’.

Ah, but what would Jane Austen have written about Charlotte Brontë?

Abigail wrote: "Ah, but what would Jane Austen have written about Charlotte Brontë?"

I just have to tell you this made me smile. It’s an excellent question

Listening to Mark Twain's strictures on JA is like listening to Voltaire point out Shakespeare's flaws.

But will Disney stories and films still be bestsellers in 200 year's time?

In a wonderful little book, Jane Austen on Love, Juliet McMaster makes a very good case for deep feelings of love and passion in Jane Austen's novels revealed by "her powerful use of understatement in emotional scenes." "Again and again Jane Austen indicates a severe emotional shock by this kind of understatement. She is not avoiding the presentation of strong feelings: she is presenting them by indirection."

These essays assume that the reader has read all of the novels, so they are full of spoilers.

For those who know Austen fairly well: I have seen the observation that Brontë was simply incapable of recognizing Austen’s restraint, and if she had somehow written “Mansfield Park” would probably have equipped Mrs. Norris with horns and a tail….

Ian wrote: "For those who know Austen fairly well: I have seen the observation that Brontë was simply incapable of recognizing Austen’s restraint, and if she had somehow written “Mansfield Park” would probably..."

I love Charlotte Brontë's later novels more. Re-reading Jane Eyre, I was almost embarrassed by the melodrama.

I have never quite managed to complete a re-reading of Jane Eyre, although I was blown away by my first reading when young. I should try it again: the last time was after watching the 1971 (!) US TV release of the version starring George C. Scott and Susannah York, so it has been a very long time.