Jane Austen
From BookJive
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| Born: | Dec. 16, 1775 |
| Died: | July 18, 1817 |
| Residence: | Great Britain |
| School: | Oxford |
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Contents |
[edit] Biography
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Her biting social commentary and masterful use of both free indirect speech and irony eventually made Austen one of the most influential and honoured novelists in English literature.
Jane Austen was born in 1775 at a rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, one of two daughters of the Reverend George Austen (1731–1805) and his wife Cassandra (née Leigh) (1739–1827). Her brothers James and Henry followed in their father's path and joined the Anglican clergy (the latter towards the end of his life after a successful career as a banker), while her brothers Francis and Charles both pursued naval careers. There was also a disabled brother, George, who did not live with the Austens.
She was close to her sister Cassandra throughout her life. The abundant correspondence between them provides historians with the greatest insight into Jane's thoughts. It is regrettable that Cassandra destroyed some of it after Jane's death; no one is certain why. Cassandra drew the only undisputed portrait of Jane, a somewhat rudimentary, coloured sketch which currently resides in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
In 1783, Austen was educated briefly by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton; finally in 1785–1786, she attended the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire.
She began her first novel in 1789. Her family life was conducive to writing; the Austen family often enacted plays, which gave Jane an opportunity to present her stories. They also borrowed novels from the local library, which influenced her writing. She was encouraged to write, especially by her brother Henry, who wrote a little himself.
In 1796, Jane Austen had a flirtation with Tom Lefroy, later Lord High Justice of Ireland, who was a younger relative of a friend of hers. Jane Austen wrote two letters to Cassandra mentioning him. In a letter dated 9 January 1796, she wrote:
"After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove -- it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded". ”
On 16 January 1796, there is another mention:
"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 as I write at the melancholy idea".
It does not seem to have been a serious relationship and the love affair did not last long. However, it has been suggested that Austen might have had him in mind when she created the character Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
In 1801, following her father's retirement, the family moved to the fashionable spa city of Bath, which provides the setting for many of her novels. However, Jane Austen, like her character Anne Elliot, seemed to have "persisted in a disinclination for Bath." Her dislike may have been influenced by the family's precarious financial situation and from being uprooted from her settled existence in the country.
In 1802, Austen received a marriage proposal from a wealthy, but "big and awkward" man named Harris Bigg-Wither, the younger brother of her friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg and six years her junior.The marriage would have freed her from some of the constraints and dependency she experienced as a spinster. She initially accepted his offer, only to change her mind and refuse him the following day.
After the death of her father in 1805, Austen, her sister and her mother lived in Southampton with her brother Frank and his family for several years, before moving to Chawton in 1809. Here, her wealthy brother Edward had an estate with a cottage, where his mother and sisters lived. This house is now a museum and is a popular site for tourists and literary pilgrims alike. Austen wrote her later novels there. It wasn't until 1811, six years before her death, that her first novel Sense and Sensibility was published, at the expense of her brother Henry and his wife Eliza.
In 1816, she began to suffer from ill health. In May 1817, she moved to Winchester to be closer to her doctor. Jane's condition became increasingly worse, and on 18 July 1817, she died at the age of forty-one and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. It is now thought by some that she may have suffered from Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands that was often caused by tuberculosis. The disease was at that time unnamed. Others, such as biographer Carol Shields, have hypothesized that she died from breast cancer.
[edit] Work
Austen's best-known work is Pride and Prejudice, which is viewed as an exemplar of her socially astute comedies of manners. Austen also wrote a satire of the popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, which was published posthumously in 1818. Adhering to a common contemporary practice for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously; this kept her out of leading literary circles.
Austen's comedies of manners, especially Emma, are often cited for their perfection of form. Modern critics continue to unearth new perspectives on Austen's keen commentary regarding the predicament of unmarried genteel English women in the late 1790s and early 1800s, a consequence of inheritance law and custom, which usually directed the bulk of a family's fortune to eldest male heirs.
Although Austen's career coincided with the Romantic movement in literature, she was not an intensely passionate Romantic. She was more neo-classical. Passionate emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel: the young woman who exercises twice a day is more likely to find real happiness than one who irrationally elopes with a capricious lover. Austen's artistic values had more in common with David Hume and John Locke than with her contemporaries William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. Among Austen's influences were Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, George Crabbe and Fanny Burney.
Although Austen did not promote passionate emotion as did other Romantic movement writers, she was also sceptical of its opposite -- excessive calculation and practicality often leads to disaster in Austen novels. Jane loved to write her novels in peace and she only shared them with her family when they were performing plays.
[edit] Books
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