On December 16th 1775 in the Hampshire
village of Steventon, England, was born Jane Austen; a realist English novelist
from the romantic pre-victorian period. She was born in a middle class family
of the country nobility of which the customs form the substance of her novels.
Jane Austen was the seventh child in a family of eight children and the second
daughter of George and Cassandra Austen. She is one of the most loved and
famous writers who wrote novels which are very appreciated in literature even
nowadays. Austen is admired for the fact that she wrote her novels in the
period in which there were few women writers and she would open the way for the
next generation of women writers. Many of her books were written under a
pseudonym. Her father, the Reverend George Austen, was a rector of the village
who also tutored young students in order to supplement his income. Jane was
educated mainly by her father, who taught his own children as well as many
other children who were boarded with the family, even though she and her sister
were attending many different schools. When Jane was 25, her father retired and
by that time, two of her brothers became admirals, had a family and a career of
their own. Her mother was a woman of ready wit and was famous for her verses
and stories. Jane lived in the middle of a numerous family, with some English
counties such as Bath, Southampton and Londra. All her life, she lived in the
same room with her sister, Cassandra, and she didn’t meet any other important
writer. Jane Austen was in correspondence with her sister the most of their
lives and many things that we know about Austen were found from those letters
but Cassandra had destroyed a part from the letters. Even if her books relate
the central drama of marriage, Austen has never been married although it seems
to had had many sentimental adventures and had rejected a marriage proposal.[1]
Jane Austen was exposed to the world of the English
upper classes through the visits that she has made to her brother Edward who
was adopted by a wealthy and childless cousin. She was very close to her sister,
Cassandra who remained unmarried. She was her closest companion and they were
inseparable. From 1785 to 1786 the two sisters attended the Reading Ladies
Boarding School where they studied French, music, dancing, etc and they also
studied at Oxford when they were eight years old. The Reading Ladies Boarding
School, where lived the two sisters, seem to be described by Austen in her
novel ‘Emma’. Their studies had
finished because of economical reasons and they continued to study at home,
especially Jane Austen who was guided by her father, who had a large library, in
order to develop her literary mind and her received education was also
consummate through the numerous readings. Austen read the Fielding, Richardson
and also Frances Burney. She started her career when she was twelve and in her
writing, she was influenced by different circumstances in her life that she
used in her settings. The works written between 1787 and 1793 were put together
into three manuscripts which are known as ‘Juvenilia’
and in which, some pieces, are dedicated for Jane Austen’s first niece, Anna.
During Austen’s life, Anna tried to write a never completed novel called ‘Which is the Heroine?’ being advised by
her aunt, but it is said that she destroyed the manuscript after Jane Austen’s
death. As she continued writing, Austen
became sentimental novels of the eighteenth century as her novels concentrate
on marriage, love and courtship. In 1793 Jane Austen begun to write her first
lengthy piece of work called ‘Lady Susan’,
a novella written in the form of letters, but it was never published in her lifetime.
Another early work is ‘Love and Freindship’.
In this period, Austen also started to have ideas for the novel that would
later become ‘Sense and Sensibility’.
In 1795, at Steventon, Austen met the nephew of
their neighbors, Thomas Lefroy, the relative of Austen’s friend. The
correspondence between Austen and her sister Cassandra, reveals the fact that
Tom and Austen spent some time together and it may implied some romantic
feelings, but, it couldn’t be spoke
about a marriage between them. Little time after that, her aunt from Lefroy
tried to marry Jane with Reverend Samuel Blackall, but she wasn’t interested to
marry. After the romance that she had with Tom, Jane Austen worked at her
second novel called ‘First Impressions’
which later became ‘Pride and Prejudice’
and she also started a revision of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and worked on a
gothic satire called ‘Northanger Abbey.’
The Austen resided at Steventon until 1801 when Reverend Austen announced his
retirement and they moved to Bath. This removal from her childhood home
provoked mixed feelings to Austen and she had a lack of productivity as writer
because during her time at Bath she only did some revisions to ‘Northanger Abbey’ and started but
abandoned a fourth novel. [2]
In 1802, while in Bath, Jane Austen was proposed for
the first time by Harris Bigg-Wither. She accepted, but the following day she
changed her mind. Jane Austen wrote, sarcastically, in a letter to Cassandra:
“Tell Mary that
I make over Mr. Heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit
in future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain
wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C.Powlett wanted to give me, as
I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I do not care
sixpence. Friday: At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with
Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow at the
melancholy idea.” [3]
Thus, even if she had the chance, she never married.
Her niece wrote about Austen’s refuse that “Having
accepted him, she found she was miserable and that the place and fortune which
would certainly be his, could not alter the man. I have always respected her
for the courage in canceling that ‘yes’.”[4]
In 1805, Jane Austen’s father died and the Austen women lived at the
charity of Jane’s brother. Thus, Jane,
her sister and their mother moved to his wealthy brother’s cottage at Chawton
where was much quieter than in Bath and Jane Austen started to write more
often. Being thirty four, she didn’t had any hope to get married and she
started to concentrate upon her novelist career and, thus, while in Chawton,
four of her novels saw the light of the print: ‘Sense and Sensibility’ published in 1811, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in 1813, ‘Mansfield
Park’ in 1814, a novel that was sold all the copies in little time (less
than six months) and ‘Emma’ in 1815
which was dedicated to the regent prince. In the following year was published a
second edition of ‘Mansfield Park’,
but this edition hadn’t the same success like the first one. In 1816 she fall
ill, some critics said that she suffered from Addison’s disease. She was moved
in Winchester for a better care. In spite of her illness, she continued to
write and even started a new novel which she hadn’t finished because she died
on July, 8 1817, at the age of 42, and her two novels, the ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’ were published
posthumously. The last words she said were that she doesn’t want anything but
to die.[5]
Jane Austen’s novels generally present the drama of
the common life and customs that were present in the life of country English
families. She didn’t write about what she didn’t know. All her books tend to
represent a moral lesson for the heroines that are constantly trying to succeed
in the life and to model their behavior in a mean society and her novels
reflect her opinions regarding the life and the life that she had was a source
of inspiration in her writings. Unfortunately, she spent most of her life being
criticized by other social classes. The members of her family were her best
friends and those from the same social class and, maybe, this is the reason
according to which, the majority of her novels are centered around two, three
families that are from the middle social classes. There have been two museums
that were dedicated to Jane Austen: The Jane Austen Centre in Bath and The Jane
Austen’s House Museum, the place where she lived between 1809 and 1816. [6]
List
of Works:
·
Novels: - ‘Sense and Sensibility’ (1811)
- ‘Pride and
Prejudice’ (1813)
- ‘Mansfield Park’ (1814)
- ‘Emma’ (1815)
- ‘Northanger Abbey’
(1818) - posthumous
- ‘Persuasion’ (1818)
– posthumous
·
Short fiction: - ‘Lady Susan’ (1794,
1805)
·
Unfinished fiction: -‘The Watsons’ (1804)
-‘Sandition’ (1817)
·
Other works: -‘Plan of a Novel’
-‘Letters’
Juvenilia – volume the first: -‘Edgar and Emma’
-‘The three sisters’
-‘Amelia Webster’
Juvenilia – volume the second: -‘A Tale’
-‘The History of England’
Juvenilia – volume the third:
-‘Evelyn’
-‘Catharine’ or ‘the Bower’[7]
[1] Biography: Life
(1775-1817) and Family, http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janelife.html#life1a, 12.02.2014
Biography of Jane Austen, http://www.gradesaver.com/author/jane-austen/,
12.02.2014
[2]
Biography:
Life (1775-1817) and Family, http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janelife.html#life1a, 12.02.2014
[3] Biography: Life
(1775-1817) and Family, http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janelife.html#life1a, 12.02.2014
[4]
Jane Austen
Biography, Childhood, Juvenilia, In love, Novelist, Death (1775-1817)
http://www.shmoop.com/jane-austen/in-love.html, 12.02.2014
[5] Biography: Life
(1775-1817) and Family, http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janelife.html#life1a, 12.02.2014
[6] Biography: Life
(1775-1817) and Family, http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janelife.html#life1a, 12.02.2014
[7] Jane Austen,
List of Works, http://classiclit.about.com/od/austenjane/a/Jane-Austen-List-Of-Works.htm, 12.02.2014
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