The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Place any background info or pre hat conversations here

In its original form, this is thought by many biographers to be the first novel Jane Austen wrote (though many of the plot points of Austen’s life are taken as gospel on slim or indirect evidence)—but it’s hard to know what that original version was like. The version we read was prepared for the press more than a decade later. There is a family tradition that the first version was written as a novel in letters—but based on textual evidence, it seems more likely that Pride and Prejudice was the one that was originally epistolary. Austen did not preserve early versions of her books so it’s impossible to know for sure.

This book does reveal preoccupations of her youth. She started writing short stories at age 11, and most of her early works are spoofs of the absurdities of the age’s sentimental fiction (her earliest works, if you haven’t run across them, are hilarious and quite vulgar). She displays a sharp critical, even judgmental, mind from an early age. Although S&S is a great leap forward in sophistication and refinement, it also reveals a similar focus on reacting to other literature; as her career went on, she gradually lost that self-consciousness and her writing became more original.

A lot of the book depends on shades of meaning that have changed since c. 1800, including the words in the title. A good survey is Stuart Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen, now in Kindle. I consider it an essential part of my Austen library.