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Jane Austen - Work (02_work.doc)

Jane Austen - [edit]Work

Austen was the daughter of a clergyman, nearly became engaged to another, and clergymen play central roles in most of her novels. She represents the Church of England, with its emphasis on calm, rational belief and a suspicion of "enthusiasm" and the Puritan tradition. Yet we hardly ever see her clergymen at work, and death occurs rarely in her novels and is then treated with a minimum of sentimentality. Still, one cannot read her works without getting the sense of a strong moral code underlying the comedy.

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. Her family life was also 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 Austen's writing. She was encouraged to write especially by her brother Henry, who wrote a little himself.

Austen began to write while in her teens and completed the original manuscript of Pride and Prejudice, titled First Impressions, between 1796 and 1797. Pride and Prejudice is Austen's best-known work, it is viewed as an exemplar of her socially astute comedies of manners. A publisher rejected the manuscript, and it was not until 1809 that Austen began the revisions that would bring it to its final form. Pride and Prejudice was published in January 1813, two years after Sense and Sensibility, her first novel, and it achieved a popularity that has endured to this day. Austen published four more novels: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Austen also wrote a satire of the popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, which was published posthumously.

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.

Adhering to a common contemporary practice for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously; her anonymity kept her out of leading literary circles. During Austen’s life only her immediate family knew of her authorship of these novels. At one point, she wrote behind a door that creaked when visitors approached; this warning allowed her to hide manuscripts before anyone could enter so that she would have time to hide her manuscripts when her nephews and nieces ran into the room. Gilbert and Gubar point out in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979).

Though publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a female’s entrance into the public sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity. Additionally, Austen may have sought anonymity because of the more general atmosphere of repression pervading her era. As the Napoleonic Wars (1800–1815) threatened the safety of monarchies throughout Europe, government censorship of literature proliferated.

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 or Lord Byron. Among Austen's influences were Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, George Crabbe and Fanny Burney.