07-Jane Austen

1775-1817I. Life and Education●Jane was born on Dec. 16, 1775 in the rectory at Steventon, Hampshire County;she was the sixth/seventh of seven/eight children of George Austin, a clergyman of the Church of England, who as a cultivated man, comfortably prosperous, taught and encouraged her both in her reading and her writing. Asa child and young woman Jane read widely, including novelists, poets and herparticular favourite George Crabbe (1754 - 1832)●Jane's life is notable for its lack of events; she lived in the midst of a lively andaffectionate family, with occasional visits to Bath, London, Lyme, and her brothers' houses. On her father's retirement in 1801, the family moved to Bath for several years and then to Southampton, settling finally at Chawton Cottage, near Alton, Hampshire, which was Jane's home for the rest of her life.●Jane herself never married, but like many of the heroines of her novels and likemany of her contemporaries, she was fascinated by marriage, especially by the kind of marriage prized by her contemporaries: marriage to a gentleman with a landed estate. (She did have several suitors, one of whom she accepted one evening, only to withdraw her acceptance the following morning.)II. Social Settings●The Romantic Age began in 1798 ended in 1832, which was an age romanticenthusiasm, whose political turmoil stirred by French Revolution was reflected in the literature. It rose and grew under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.●In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist,and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace.●At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and ofthe energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention.●*Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1772-1778) and WilliamGodwin (1756-1836) had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all.III. Writing Career●The juvenilia (1789 - 1791), written in her early and mid-teens, are alreadyincisive and elegantly expressed: Love and Friendship(1789),A History of England (1790), A Collection of Letters (1791),Lesley Castle Lady Susan (1793-4).●Jane's major novels are Sense and Sensibility(1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813),Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Northanger Abbey, (a satire on the 1Gothic romance, sold to a publisher for £10 in 1803, but as it was not published, bought back by members of the family) was finally issued) and Persuasion (posthumously 1818). 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.●Jane's letters cover the period 1793-1817, her correspondents include Cassandra,her friend Martha Lloyd, and her nieces and nephews, to whom she confided her views on some literary writings. Although Jane's letters are different from epistolary novels, they belong to this literary style.IV. The Inheritance●Jane is a direct literary descendant of Addison, Goldsmith, and Miss Burney,and an admirer of Cowper and Crabbe.●The influence from her best-loved authors with Augustan affinities: Richardson,Johnson, Cowper, and Burney, to whom she pays the compliment of frequent and familiar reference.●The Bible in KJV and the Book of Common Prayer were linguistically familiarto her and "were a door opening backward into 'English Literature, Ancient'"1.●Shakespeare's writings as well as all those traditional writings she had readexert great influence on her.●*Her relative, Cassandra Cooke, author of Battleridge, might have shed someinfluence on her as she referred him as "such a respectable Writer" when she saluted Elizabeth Hamilton.V. Writer's Masterpiece(s)●Her quizzical spirit shows itself at its liveliest in the first novel she sketched asearly as 1797 Pride and Prejudice, originally a youthful work entitled 'First Impression'.●Sense and Sensibility, growing from a sketch entitled 'Elinor and Marianne',makes fun of a particular literary ideology.●*Delicacy of analysis and more serious mood are increasingly characteristic ofher other works. But all her work bears a unique imprint.VI. Literary features●Jane produced between 1796 and 1816, during the wars against the FrenchRevolution and Napoleon, work that for calmness, delicacy, exquisite touch, and miniature grace has no rival in the whole of English literature.●Jane Austen's novels are comedies of manners that depict the self-containedworld of provincial ladies and gentlemen. Most of her works revolve around the delicate business of providing husbands for marriageable daughters.1Isobel Grundy, Jane Austen and Literary Traditions, in Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 195.2●She is particularly noted for her vivid delineations and lively interplay ofcharacter, 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.●Jane Austen's novels are comedies of manners that depict the self-containedworld of provincial ladies and gentlemen. Most of her works revolve around the delicate business of providing husbands for marriageable daughters.●Her novels are highly prized not only for their light irony, humor, and depictionof contemporary English country life, but also for their underlying serious qualities.●In the half dozen novels she wrote, Jane set herself to study the wars of feminineaffection, the delicacies and distresses of young and sensitive but not passionate hearts, their mistakes and their sorrows in first love. Around these young ladies she placed, with a lively though restrained sense of comedy, and with perfect exactness of touch, the various figures of the gentlefolk of a country neighbourhood. She did not seek to instruct her readers, her aim was to draw a picture that would amuse them.●She was quite aware of her special excellences and limitations, comparingherself to a miniaturist. Today she is regarded as one of the great masters of the English novel.VII. Literary trend represented●With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within thecontext of English country life. She wrote during the Romantic Age, an age of romantic enthusiasm, her work is normally included in British Romanticism, as "Austen (and Scott ... are) central to Romantic novel readers' interests, artistic and political",2and "she uses the courtship story, settings in genteel domestic and social life, and the plot of romantic comedy to show the interaction of landed gentry and their professional middle-class dependents and allies as they negotiate through temptations of courtliness, contamination by vulgarity, or socially destructive independence."3("Nor did Romantic novel simply reject earlier forms: Austen modeled her moralism and her meticulous prose on Johnson, while the epistolary novel largely through the meditation of Goethe's Werther..., and numerous others."4)●[Although William Branford Shubrich Clymer, an American journalist, said onecentury ago when he began the "placing" of Austen in literary history, "The sentimentalists were virtually a thing of the past, and the romanticists were in full career when Jane Austen, cutting loose from both influences, set again on a 2Gary Kelly, Romantic Fiction, Stuart Curran, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism¸Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 214.3ibid., p. 210.4Marshall Brown, Romanticism and Enlightenment, Stuart Curran, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism¸Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.28.3firm basis the realistic study of manners ... She belongs to a small group of women who excelled in what has been well called 'fictitious biography'." and "her work is the slender thread which carried the strain of realism safely through the Romantic age from the hands of Fielding and Richardson to those of Thackeray and Trollope," (which however 'is now itself historical').5●Some people ridicules, "Jane Austen knew neither their (the romantics') heightsnor their depths".6Or, to some people's belief, "her (Austen's) work defies classification"7]VIII. Limitations●Austen's work has a very narrow literary field. She confines herself to smallcountry parishes, whose simple country people become the characters of her novels.●Her plots are over straight-forward and there is little action in her work.5Isobel Grundy, Jane Austen and Literary Traditions, in Edward Copeland and Juliet Mcmaster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 192-3.6Emile Legouis, A Short Histry of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 1982, p.298.7The Romantic Period, Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, Copyright (c) 2003.4。