Jane Austen

Facts, quotes, works

Facts
The seventh child of George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen, Jane Austen was born in Steventon, a village in southern England in 1775. In her lifetime she completed six novels, including Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Four of them were published before her death. For her first love, Austen got a story worthy of one of her novels - one that in fact has certain things in common with that of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. The object of her love, Tom Lefroy, was the Irish nephew of her close friend Anne Lefroy. Knowing that Tom would lose his inheritance if he

Quotes
Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side. I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it
saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not

like. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

Works
Northanger Abbey
In Northanger Abbey we have two kinds of novels cleverly and most effectively welded into one. The Bath scenes which occupy the first part of the novel belong to the genre that describes a young lady's entrance into the world. The later chapters set in Northanger Abbey are a skit on the popular Gothic novels of the day.

With such literary origins, it is not surprising to find in Northanger Abbey a highly self-conscious work of art. Quite deliberately, Jane Austen keeps reminding us that we are reading a novel. This is appropriate in a work whose chief theme is the difference between illusion and reality, and the importance of knowing which we are dealing with at any one time.
The novel follows Catherine Morland's progress from innocence and delusion to understanding and clear sight. She never loses her honest and unaffectedness, which is what makes her an attractive heroine despite being neither clever nor witty. But she does learn a few lessons in the ways of the world, while artlessly working her way into the affections of the hero. He is clever and witty - in fact, in his

 Sense and Sensibility

The integrity of the self and the claims of society lie at the heart of this novel, which explores the destiny of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. The world of Sense and Sensibility is a particularly public one. Much of life is lived communally; the heroines are forced into a great deal of empty socialising and their romantic and financial circumstances are the subject of speculation and curiosity. With the exception of their mother and the men they eventually marry, the characters surrounding the heroines are mean-spirited, impertinent or vulgar. Against this background, we see two young women falling in love, suffering disappointment and heartache, and learning to achieve a balance between passion and prudence. Their stories are parallel, but while Elinor endures and is rewarded by marriage with the man she loves, Marianne has to remake her own character before she can find peace of mind. The earliest of her novels, Sense and Sensibility is a reaction to Jane Austen's youthful reading. The cult of sensibility, which was prevalent in the literature of that time, argued that to have overpowering feelings was a sign of superior character. It followed that it was as wrong as it was hopeless to try to control or hide such feelings, whatever inconvenience or suffering they may cause their owner or anybody else. Jane Austen had two quarrels with the cult of sensibility. The first was that people might exaggerate and falsify their feelings in order to be thought

 Pride and Prejudice

From its famous first sentence to its almost fairytale ending, Pride and Prejudice sparkles with wit and youthful high spirits. The heroine is perhaps the most delightful of any created by Jane Austen - or by any other writer, for that matter. The dialogue is masterly, the comic characters wonderfully ridiculous and the plot has a most satisfying shape. If the novel lacks the depth of Jane Austen's later creations, it is unequalled in surface brilliance and humour. The tone of the novel is a happy one. The heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, laughs at most of the follies around her, and we laugh with her. She has her share of suffering, but not enough to occupy a very large proportion of the narrative. Except for occasional moments of despair, her outlook is an optimistic one. Perhaps more optimistic than her economic circumstances warrant - for the Bennet girls really will be homeless when their father dies, and Mrs Bennet, for all her faults, should be given some credit for worrying about their future. Elizabeth's insouciance is partly the result of her nature, partly a reaction to her mother's fussing, but it is also an unconscious product of the author's youth. At the time she wrote Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had not failed to observe that in society as it stood, marriage was 'the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune'; but she had hardly yet begun to reflect seriously on the predicament of dependent or dispossessed women.

 Mansfield Park
The first of Jane Austen's novels to have been conceived and wholly written at Chawton, Mansfield Park is very different in tone from its predecessors. For some readers it is the most substantial and satisfying of Jane Austen's novels. Others like it the least, perhaps because wit and humour, though not absent from the novel, seem to be regarded with some suspicion. Most controversial of all is the heroine, Fanny Price. Some feel as tenderly toward her as her author does; others find her too solemn. Fanny comes to Mansfield at the age of ten, a poor relation. Timid and self-effacing, she stands on the sidelines for the first half of the novel, observing the courtships and flirtations of her cousins the Bertrams and visitors to the neighbourhood, Henry and Mary Crawford. The departure of some of these characters forces

 Emma
Austen called her eponymous heroine when she was writing Emma. But readers do like Emma, very much, despite her faults of snobbery and vanity. She is an affectionate and patient daughter, a delightful aunt, and a loving friend to Mrs Weston. But it is the play of her mind that perhaps entrances us most. Emma is often playful. It is one of the qualities which Mr Knightley loves her for, and which seems to promise them a happy partnership. But she can also be rational. We are told early in the novel that though she dearly loves her father, he is no companion to her. 'He could not meet her in conversation, either rational or playful'. Mr Knightley can. They are both natural leaders of their society, and function well together, long before they have recognised their mutual love. Emma dominates her novel to an extent not equalled by any other Jane Austen heroine, and it is rightly named after her. While most of the novels begin by explaining the family circumstances before coming in to focus on the heroine, the first words of this novel are: 'Emma Woodhouse', and the first sentence is a description of her personality: 'handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition'. All Jane Austen's narratives are seen through a young woman's eyes, but Emma Woodhouse does not just experience, she
A heroine whom no-one but myself will much like', Jane

 Persuasion
Jane Austen was about forty years old when she wrote Persuasion. Until then, she had always taken as her heroine a young woman at the threshold of life, inexperienced, falling in love for the first time, aged somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one. Now she told a different kind of story. Anne Elliot is twentyseven, with a fully mature mind. For her, falling in love is something that belongs to her past. Eight years before the novel opens, she had become engaged to marry Captain Wentworth of the Royal Navy, but was persuaded to break off the engagement for reasons of prudence. She has spent the last eight years regretting the decision, and does not expect to find love again. The novel has two settings. From Michaelmas to Christmas Anne resides in the Somerset countryside, first at the home of her married sister, then with her friend Lady Russell. Two days are spent by the sea at Lyme, where events occur that will change the destiny of several of the characters. After Christmas Anne goes reluctantly to live in Bath. Her spend-thrift, snobbish father, Sir Walter Elliot, has taken a house here in order to economise, while his country estate is let to Captain Wentworth's sister and her husband, Admiral Croft. Anne

Thank you so very much for your attention.