brit lit week twelve

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. ---Pride and Prejudice
Austen the Neoclassicist
Sir Walter Scott & Jane Austen
Sir Walter Scott
Generally considered to be the creator and a great master of the historical novel.
(1771-1832)
Border Stories

Much of Austen’s fiction is in direct response to the excesses of popular literature of her day --- sentimentalism, melodrama and the gothic novel.
Her Novels
Border Ballads


Scott's interest in border ballads finally bore fruit in his collection of them entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vol. (1802–03). The work made Scott's name known to a wide public. By 1813 Scott had begun to tire of poetry, and the greater depth and verve of Lord Byron's narrative poems threatened to oust him from his position as supreme purveyor of this kind of literary entertainment. In 1813 Scott rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had started in 1805, and in the early summer of 1814 he wrote with extraordinary speed almost the whole of his novel, which he titled Waverley .

Sir Walter Scott’s comment which revived interest in Austen

“She has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which to me the most wonderful I ever met with... .The exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early…”

From his earliest years, Scott was fond of listening to his elderly relatives' accounts and stories of the Scottish Border. His explorations of the neighboring countryside developed in him both a love of natural beauty and a deep appreciation of the historic struggles of his Scottish forebears.
Scott’s Style and Influence


Scott gathered the disparate strands of contemporary novel-writing techniques into his own hands and harnessed them to his deep interest in Scottish history and his knowledge of antiquarian lore. The technique of the omniscient narrator and the use of regional speech, localized settings, sophisticated character delineation, and romantic themes treated in a realistic manner were all combined by him into virtually a new literary form, the historical novel. His influence on other European and American novelists was immediate and profound, and though interest in some of his books declined somewhat in the 20th century, his reputation remains secure.
Jane Austen
(1775-1817)
Jane Austen, in a portrait based on one drawn by her sister Cassandra House of Jane Austen (today it is a museum)
Jane Austen



In the mid-1790s Scott became interested in German Romanticism, Gothic novels, and Scottish border ballads. His first published work, The Chase, and William and Helen (1796), was a translation of two German Romantic ballads.
Her Novels

Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma.

There are in her novels no heroic passions nor astounding adventures and the most urgent preoccupation of her bright, young heroines is courtship and finally marriage:

Her novels show a wealth of humour, wit and delicate satire. Her plots are straight-forward, with little action. Her characters are like real living creatures, with faults and virtues mixed as in real life. Her prose flows easily, naturally. Her dialogues are admirably true to life.

Austen’s themes, structure and style best fit the Neoclassical literary period. Her works show clearly her firm belief in the predominance of reason over passion, the sense of responsibility, good manners and clear judgment over the romantic tendencies of emotion and individuality.
Tales of History

ቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱ
Scott followed up Waverley with a whole series of historical novels set in Scotland that are now known as the “Waverley” novels, including his masterpieces Rob Roy and The Heart of Midlothian (both 1818). It was only after writing these novels of Scottish history that Scott, driven by the state of his finances and the need to satisfy the public appetite for historical fiction that he himself had created, turned to themes from English history and elsewhere. He thus wrote Ivanhoe (1819), a novel set in 12thcentury England and one that remains his most popular book. The best of his later novels are Redgauntlet (1824) and The Talisman (1825).