Jane Austen

Jane Austen is the most beloved and, for many readers and critics, the most perfect of English novelists. In six completed novels — Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (published posthumously, 1817) — she wrote about young women of the English gentry and their search for love, security and moral understanding, in a world where a woman without fortune had few choices but marriage. She worked, as she said, on “a little bit (two inches wide) of ivory”, and the subject of a novel was for her “three or four families in a country village”. Yet out of these small materials she made comedies of extraordinary wit, psychological depth and moral seriousness, and she perfected a technique — free indirect style — that changed the novel for ever.

Life

Steventon

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at the rectory in Steventon, a village in Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of the Rev. George Austen, the rector, and Cassandra Leigh, a clergyman’s daughter with aristocratic connections. Her father supplemented his small income by farming and by taking in boys as pupils. The family was close, lively, literary and genteelly poor. Of her six brothers, James and Henry became clergymen, Edward was adopted by rich childless cousins (the Knights) and inherited great estates in Kent and Hampshire, and Francis and Charles rose to be admirals in the Royal Navy. Her one sister, Cassandra, two years older, was her closest companion all her life.

Jane had little formal schooling — a brief spell at a school in Oxford and Southampton, where she nearly died of typhus, and two years at the Abbey House School in Reading. Her real education was her father’s library of some five hundred books and the family’s love of reading aloud, theatricals and writing. As a girl she wrote the boisterous, parodic stories and sketches now known as the Juvenilia, collected in three notebooks, mocking the sentimental novels of the day: Love and Freindship (“Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint”), The History of England… by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian.

In her early twenties she wrote the first versions of three novels: Elinor and Marianne (later Sense and Sensibility), First Impressions (later Pride and Prejudice) and Susan (later Northanger Abbey). In 1797 her father offered First Impressions to a publisher, who declined it unread. Susan was sold to a publisher in 1803 for £10 but not published.

At twenty she had a flirtation with a young Irishman, Tom Lefroy, whose family sent him away because neither had money; she wrote to Cassandra, “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy.” Cassandra’s fiancé died of yellow fever in the West Indies in 1797; neither sister ever married.

Bath and the unsettled years

In 1801 her father retired and moved the family to Bath, the fashionable spa town. Jane, according to family tradition, fainted when told. The Bath years were unproductive. In December 1802, at 26, she accepted a proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, the younger brother of friends, heir to a large estate — and withdrew her acceptance the next morning, choosing poverty and independence over a loveless marriage. She began a novel, The Watsons, and abandoned it. Her father died in 1805, leaving his widow and daughters dependent on the brothers; they moved between lodgings in Bath and Southampton.

Chawton

In 1809 her rich brother Edward offered them a cottage on his estate at Chawton, Hampshire. There, in settled peace, Austen revised her early novels and wrote three new ones. With her brother Henry’s help, Sense and Sensibility was published “By a Lady” in 1811, at her own risk, and made a profit of £140. Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813 (she sold the copyright for £110), Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815. Her authorship became an open secret; the Prince Regent admired her books, and his librarian, the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, suggested she write a historical romance about the House of Saxe-Coburg. She declined: “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life… No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way.”

In 1816 she fell ill, probably with Addison’s disease or a lymphoma. She finished Persuasion, began the comic Sanditon about a seaside resort, and in May 1817 was taken to Winchester for medical treatment. She died there on 18 July 1817, aged 41, in Cassandra’s arms, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Her epitaph praises her “benevolence of heart” and “extraordinary endowments of mind” but does not mention that she wrote novels. Henry’s “Biographical Notice” in the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion revealed her name to the public.

The novels

Sense and Sensibility (1811) contrasts two sisters: Elinor Dashwood, who governs her feelings by “sense”, and Marianne, who follows her “sensibility” — romantic, impulsive emotion. Left poor when their father dies and their half-brother John (persuaded by his wife, in a famous scene of mounting meanness) gives them nothing, both fall in love; Elinor with the reserved Edward Ferrars, secretly engaged to the scheming Lucy Steele; Marianne with the dashing Willoughby, who jilts her for an heiress. Marianne nearly dies of grief and illness, and learns a measure of sense; she marries the steady, older Colonel Brandon.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) — see Pride and Prejudice — tells of Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters of a family whose estate is entailed away from females, and her clash with the proud, rich Mr Darcy. Austen called it “too light & bright & sparkling”.

Mansfield Park (1814) is her most serious and controversial novel. Fanny Price, a poor cousin brought up in the grand house of Sir Thomas Bertram, is timid, morally steadfast, and in love with her cousin Edmund. While Sir Thomas is away at his plantations in Antigua, the young people stage an improper play, Lovers’ Vows; the worldly, charming Crawford siblings, Henry and Mary, disturb the household. Fanny refuses Henry’s proposal, steadfast against everyone’s pressure, and is vindicated when he elopes with her married cousin Maria. Fanny, quiet and unglamorous, divides readers; the novel’s mention of Sir Thomas’s slave plantations has been central to postcolonial readings since Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993).

Emma (1815) — perhaps her masterpiece — concerns “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”: Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich”, twenty-one, mistress of her father’s house in the village of Highbury, who amuses herself by matchmaking. She persuades her protégée Harriet Smith, a pretty girl of unknown parentage, to refuse a worthy farmer and aim higher; she misreads every situation — the vicar Mr Elton’s attentions, the mysterious Frank Churchill’s flirtation with her, the reserved Jane Fairfax — and at the Box Hill picnic she insults the poor, garrulous Miss Bates. Mr Knightley, her old friend and neighbour, rebukes her: “It was badly done, indeed!” Emma’s humiliation brings self-knowledge — and the realisation “that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” The novel is a masterpiece of irony: we see the world largely through Emma’s mistaken eyes and must learn, with her, to read it rightly. It is also an early detective structure — the clues to the secret engagement are all there on first reading.

Northanger Abbey (written c. 1798–99, published 1817) is a comedy and a parody of the Gothic novel. Catherine Morland, a naive seventeen-year-old addicted to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, visits Bath and then the ancient abbey home of the Tilneys, where she imagines dark secrets — a murdered wife, a mysterious manuscript (which turns out to be a laundry list). Henry Tilney gently corrects her. The novel includes a famous defence of the novel as a form “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed”.

Persuasion (1817), her last and most autumnal novel, tells of Anne Elliot, 27, who eight years before was persuaded by a family friend, Lady Russell, to break her engagement to a penniless naval officer, Frederick Wentworth. Now he returns, a rich captain from the Napoleonic wars, and seems to court another. Anne, overlooked by her vain father and sisters, quietly proves her worth; the novel ends with Wentworth’s letter, written as he overhears Anne speaking of women’s constancy — “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” It is a novel of second chances, and of the rising naval meritocracy against a decaying aristocracy.

Art and method

Free indirect style (style indirect libre) is the technique Austen did most to develop: narration in the third person that slips into a character’s own idiom and point of view without quotation marks. When Emma says “Harriet certainly was not clever, but she had a sweet, docile, grateful disposition”, we hear Emma’s complacent judgement through the narrator’s voice; the irony lets us see both what Emma thinks and what she misses. The technique allowed the novel to represent consciousness from inside while keeping an ironic distance, and it became the basis of the modern novel from Flaubert to Woolf.

Irony and dialogue. Austen’s narrative voice is ironic, precise and epigrammatic; her dialogue reveals character with economy — every speaker in Emma has a distinct voice, from Miss Bates’s breathless chatter to Mr Woodhouse’s anxious hypochondria (“Nobody is healthy in London”).

Plot and structure. Her plots are tightly constructed around misunderstanding, delayed recognition and the reversal of judgement; Walter Scott, reviewing Emma, praised her “art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life”.

Range. She wrote of what she knew — the gentry and clergy of southern England — and ignored, critics once complained, the great events of her age: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution. In fact the wars are everywhere: officers in Pride and Prejudice, the navy in Mansfield Park and Persuasion, the Antigua plantation, the agricultural changes of Emma. She chose to show history through domestic life.

Themes

Marriage and money. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Austen’s comedy is founded on economics. Women of her class could not enter professions, and property often passed to male heirs; a daughter’s future depended on marriage. Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice marries the absurd Mr Collins for a home. Austen insists that one must not marry without affection — but also, as Elizabeth’s aunt says, not without the means to live.

Judgement and self-knowledge. Her heroines must learn to see clearly — to distinguish appearance from reality, charm from character, and above all to recognise their own errors. Elizabeth’s cry after reading Darcy’s letter — “Till this moment I never knew myself” — is the climax of the Austen plot.

Manners and morals. Manners, for Austen, are not superficial; they express (or betray) moral character. Rudeness to Miss Bates is a moral failing; Darcy’s pride and the Crawfords’ charm both need to be tested by conduct.

Reception and legacy

In her lifetime Austen was respected but not famous. Walter Scott admired her “exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting”. Charlotte Brontë found her cold: “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden… but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country.” A family Memoir (1869) by her nephew began a Victorian cult of “dear Aunt Jane”; in 1905 Henry James complained of the commercial “Jane” industry. Kipling’s story “The Janeites” (1924) imagined soldiers in the trenches bonded by their love of her.

In the twentieth century F. R. Leavis placed her at the head of “the great tradition” of the English novel; feminist critics (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Claudia Johnson) read her as a sharp critic of patriarchy. Film and television adaptations — above all the BBC Pride and Prejudice (1995) with Colin Firth — and countless sequels and spin-offs (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Clueless, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) have made her a global phenomenon.

In conversation

• “A truth universally acknowledged” — the opening of Pride and Prejudice, now used ironically for any supposedly obvious truth.
• “Badly done, Emma!” — Mr Knightley’s rebuke; the shortest moral lesson in English fiction.
• Free indirect style — her great technical gift to the novel: a narrator who speaks in a character’s voice while keeping an ironic distance.