Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Major works:
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Emma (1816)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Persuasion (1818)
Northanger Abbey (1818)

Biographical notes

Austen was the seventh child of eight in a country preacher's family, and she grew up in comfortable circumstances that permitted a "proper gentlewoman's" education: sewing, singing, piano, French, etc. More important than her formal education was the extensive reading her father encouraged from the family library. In a time when novels were morally suspect, the Austen family were "great novel readers," and before she was in her teens Jane was writing stories and theatricals as family entertainment.

Her liberal father tried unsuccessfully to get several of her early stories published. Three of Austen's greatest novels, including Pride and Prejudice, were originally drafted before the turn of the nineteenth century: the years of rewriting and revising resulted in the finely polished work that makes Austen one of the greatest of all British novelists.

Austen never married (there were several close calls, though), and her life was relatively uneventful. She mostly lived the good country life described in her novels: lots of quality family time, with occasional balls and extended social visits for variety. Popular and critical appreciation of Austen has never waned from her time to ours.

Features of the novels

notably unconcerned with major political and historical events of her time, which included the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and increasing social upheaval resulting from England's rapid industrialization in the early 1800s.

plots generally free of "adventure" or coincidence, dealing mostly with domestic matters and affairs of the heart.

most work is satirical in varying degrees, ironic and humorous in tone.

Austen novels involve the tangle of relationships between conflicting personalities, and usually her primary characters undergo a process of self-education and self-correction effected through a series of tribulations and misunderstandings.

Austen's work often has feminist undertones, but she is typically thought a very conservative writer: as A.C. Baugh says, "she seemed to recommend a sound education, a marriage based on congenial dispositions as well as passion, and social decorum as the keys to happiness."

Themes and motifs in Pride and Prejudice

Classic novel structure: exposition, complications and crises, climax, denouement

Irony and humor: satire of social tradition and of specific personality types

Different views of marriage: practical reality, sordid reality, and the ideal

Psychological realism and character development--even as objects of satire, Austen's characters as credible, consistent human beings

As bildungsroman or novel of initiation: self-education, self-correction, growth and change in the main characters

Feminist and forward thinking? Or politically, socially conservative?

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