The Life and Work of Jane Austen

Introduction

Jane Austen is considered one of the first great female writers. An English novelist, and now popular literary form that, until her time, was looked down upon as inferior to nonfiction and poetry, or “verse.” Austen’s novels were not popular in her day, and yet they are very representative of the cultural and historical time she lived in, providing an accurate portrayal of what life was like for a female of the genteel class. Although Jane Austen never married, all of her novels follow the same basic formula of couples overcoming personal hardships that are later rewarded with happy marriages. Austen died in poverty and relative obscurity, as none of her novels were published under her name or properly recognized for their literary achievement until after her death. Although Austen’s work is now considered amongst the classic literary canon, it continues to attract mainstream reading audiences from around the globe and has remained popular for centuries hence in popular culture and film reproductions.

Lifetime

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 into a rural middle class family. According to her biographer, Valerie Grosvenor Myer, the so called professional or genteel class that the Austen’s were considered a part of was actually not very well off and often had to feign financial security to keep good company of their wealthier friends and neighbors around them. Gary Kelly describes Austen’s father, George, as a respectable clergyman in Steventon, a small hamlet in a southern county of England called Hampshire (Kelly). Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, was from a higher social class, the gentry, marrying below her class out of genuine affection for Mr. Austen (Kelly). The idea of marrying for affection rather than money or social standing would become a popular trend in several of Austen’s novels. The village of Steventon was very rural, “only accessible by narrow winding lanes. Nowadays these lanes are surfaced and in good repair, but in the eighteenth century they were no more than rough, muddy cart tracks full of ruts” (Myer 13). Despite their relative isolation, the Austen family had many connections enabling both Jane and her sister Cassandra to travel the countryside and spend time with those above their social station. The Austen boys, as was the case with males, were educated and taken under the wing of more affluent families connected with the Austens (Kelly). As Kelly explains,

The education of Austen and her sister was not nearly as thorough and systematic as that offered their brothers. While the men would have to prepare for a profession and therefore spend their formative years accumulating intellectual and moral capital for the future, the only career open to women of the Austens' class was that of wife and mother. The sisters were prepared accordingly with some training in "accomplishments," that is, "elegant" skills such as music, drawing, dancing, and comportment. (Kelly)

Having only two years of any kind of formal education, Jane Austen’s accomplishments prove was clearly autodidactic (Myer). According to Kelly, all of the Austen family members were avid readers, even of previously published novels. He explains, “The Austens realized and appreciated the potential of the novel for social criticism and moral discourse at a time when most critics condemned novels as immoral, disseminators of decadent court culture, and subliterature fit only for women” (Kelly). Austen was influenced by the novels of Samuel Richardson, the best-known novelist of her day. Austen’s style would develop from Richardson’s early hints of realism in a way that changed the form, however, from “condemned” to celebrated (Kelly).

The Austen family, like many others in the eighteenth century, amused themselves by putting on plays (Kelly). We see this in Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example. It is probable that Jane Austen began writing these kinds of burlesque productions to amuse herself and her family members (Kelly). Furthermore, Kelly explains, “this early domestic writing shows a firm grasp of the current literary genres as well as literary styles, conventions, and clichés. Prose fiction was the major but not the only object of Austen's parody”. We know, of course, that Austen’s preferred genre was prose fiction, but as previously mentioned, it is obvious in her novels that she was aware of current events and social issues outside of the subject matter she typically wrote about. As Myer explains, Austen was a prolific reader of newspapers. It is assumed that her knowledge of crime and debauchery come from simply reading the news. There are allusions to such events in her novels. For instance, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma all have references to slavery.

Writing

The literary environment of the eighteenth century was marked by a growing and progressively changing concern over sentimentality and sensibility. While these terms seem to evade definition for both contemporaries of the age and for ourselves as modern readers, a helpful way to conceptualize the evolution of these very related, yet markedly different, movements is to chronologically follow the development from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela to Jane Austen’s Emma. Writers at this time explored the complicated relationship between reason and emotion as evident in Austen’s writing. Sense and Sensibility, as evident by the title, was another great example of this philosophical development. As Harold Bloom describes the novel,

When Austen contrasts Elinor's "sense," her practical, clear­sighted judgment and command of her feelings, with Marianne's "sensibility," her emotional intensity and belief that her feelings should guide her actions, she follows a popular convention for didactic novels of the late eighteenth century. The personalities of the two sisters are not strictly antithetical, however, as Austen modifies conventional character types with subtle irony.” (Bloom 14).

The most popular of Austen's novels is most likely Pride and Prejudice, which is a tale of consuming women and critiques both marriage and manners, which is discussed at length later in this essay. A complete list of Austen’s works are as follows, with their respective publication dates:

Sense and Sensibility: A Novel, 3 volumes (London: Printed for the author by C. Roworth & published by T. Egerton, 1811 [i.e., 1810]).

Pride and Prejudice: A Novel, 3 volumes (London: Printed for T. Egerton, 1813).

Mansfield Park: A Novel, 3 volumes (London: Printed for T. Egerton, 1814).

Emma: A Novel (3 volumes, London: Printed for John Murray, 1816 [i.e., 1815]; 2 volumes, Philadelphia: Published by M. Carey, 1816).

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 4 volumes (London: John Murray, 1818 [i.e., 1817]).

Lady Susan, and the Watsons (New York: George Munro, 1882).

Love & Freindship and Other Early Works, Now first printed from the original MS (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922; New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1922).

The Watsons (London: Leonard Parsons, 1923).

Lady Susan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). (Kelly n.p.)

The first six novels listed are her most notable and famous.

Legacy

It can easily be argued that Jane Austen turned the novel into a respected literary form. Austen’s Emma is a great lens through which we can see how her work marks an end to the anxiety over the eighteenth century obsession with the balance of reason and emotion. While writers like Wollstonecraft had already tipped the scale towards reason, so to speak, it becomes a non-issue for Austen. Finally, we have reached a state of sensibility in the purest form, and one that was respected by readers of different backgrounds. The religious concerns we saw in Pamela have ceased to exist, and the concern turns towards social standards and manners. Women like Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax are clearly held down by societal constraints and expectations, but they are no longer the helpless, virtue in distress characters popular in Richardson’s early novels like Pamela. Overabundant emotion has been done away with and the writing style reflects this change. Emma is notably more developed than Richardson’s Pamela and any other predecessors. Not only does Emma have a clear plot, it also manages to tie up all of the loose ends in its subplots such as in the courtships between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, Mr. Elton and his obnoxious wife, and Harriet Smith and Robert Martin. With Jane Austen’s Emma we are introduced to the form of the novel we are accustomed to today. As the anxiety over the reason versus emotion debate has been settled, Austen is able to offer us a real story—one that entertains, one that is ironic, and one that very craftily and covertly offers a critique of society.

The shift from sentimentalism to sensibility in the eighteenth century was not a simple process. Early writers began with an emphasis on heightened emotion, with exhaustive displays of weeping and the acceptance of emotional fickleness. When these emotions began to run wild, there began a concern over unchecked emotion to which reason was reintroduced as the solution, but this itself was not a simple process either. The reason versus emotion debate began a heated controversy over the negative effects of emotional indulgence, specifically in relation to the view of women, as sentimental feelings were viewed as inherently feminine. The debate does not end with a balance of reason versus emotion, however. It is not until the anxiety is entirely extinguished that we are able to reach the intellectual development of Jane Austen in which reason and emotion are not in opposition, but exist in tandem and employed according to necessity—this occurring quite naturally in Austen’s characters. The extensive evolution from Richardson to Austen shows a thorough philosophical debate presenting itself in the form of literature. It is through the reconciliation of the once opposing forces of reason and emotion that we are presented with the truly artful presentation of the novel as exemplified through Austen’s Emma.

Critical Reception

As B.C. Southam notes in the introduction to Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Jane Austen was not thought of as a popular literary figure, or even a novelist (2). Southam explains that Austen did not get much attention in her day, in the Victorians, or literary historians (2). According to Southam, “During her lifetime, Jane Austen knew that her works were fashionable. They enjoyed a reputation for their decorum, their realism and wit and they seem to have been widely read among the upper-middle classes” (2). With that said, it is also evident in many sources, including her letters to her sister that Austen lamented the small financial gain from her work or her lack of fame as her novels were published anonymously (Myer).

Literary criticism was not the same as it is today; at least, it wasn’t taken as seriously. As Kelly explains, “literature of the day,” read by lower or middle classes like the Austens, was a general term given to all literary forms that carried with them popular beliefs and grudges: “They condemned what they saw as aristocratic snobbery, upper-class decadence, and the patronage system that spread from the royal court and government through the rest of society” (n.p.). Ironically, many critics complained that the literature of the day was undermined by representing exactly what it sought to condemn about popular society (Kelly n.p.)

In Janet Todd’s introduction to her study of sensibility, she, like many critics of the movement, notes the difficulty of identifying a concrete definition of the term. Todd instead provides us with features of sentimental literature such as its didacticism, consciousness of class, portraits of virtue in distress, plots of sudden reversal, and the fragmented, and often unfinished, nature of these texts. With Jane Austen’s novels we are introduced to the form of the novel we are accustomed to today—one with a clear plot that offers a conclusion or ending. As the anxiety over the reason versus emotion debate has been settled, Austen is able to offer us a real story—one that entertains, one that is ironic, and one that very craftily and covertly offers a critique of society.

Regardless of the lack of critical acclaim of her work until long after Austen’s death, contemporary scholars often do her great justice. Renowned literary critic Harold Bloom has the following to say about the work of Jane Austen in his book about her life and work:

In the Dark Ages ahead of us, when the visual media will reduce everything to virtual reality, Jane Austen will survive, together with Shakespeare and Dickens. These seem the three great writers in the language who require least mediation; the reader happily can be alone with them…Austen, like Shakespeare and Dickens, will carry the aesthetic and cognitive values of the highest literary art… (Bloom 9).

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the value of Austen’s work than a likening to Shakespeare and Dickens, especially by Bloom. Contemporary literary critics still find relevance in the works of Jane Austen, proving her novels to be universal and enduring. Marxist and Feminist literary critics can have a field day with patriarchal and economic rules of society. As the opening line to Pride and Prejudice begins, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 3). This line is of interest to both Marxist and Feminist critics who would point to marriage as an ideology or social institution meant to improve or organize society along the lines of economics. Money was intended to marry money, and this becomes the problematic factor in the novel as the Bennet women are of little fortune. Women such as the Bennet sisters are expected to find husbands—this becomes their life’s goal and the driving force behind the plot of the novel.

Feminists would be outraged with the lack of choice or agency given to the female characters in the novel. They are only expected to behave according to a code of manners that includes marriage to a man of means in order to avoid destitution or shame. Additionally, women had no choice in who it was they were to marry. When Mr. Collins, the Bennet sisters’ cousin, comes to visit it is to choose one of the girls for a wife since the Bennet property was to be left to him as the only male heir in the family; women could not own their own property or even their own fate. Women were commodified as the opening line to the novel suggests. Marxists would define commondification as the displacement of value and certainly this holds true in the case of women Austen’s novel. Mr. Collins easily switches from Jane to Elizabeth Bennet proving that it is not the women’s personality that matters, but simply the fact that they are females and thus potential wives.

The feminist perspective may also find a positive quality to Pride and Prejudice, that being the fact that it was written by a woman. Although novels were most commonly considered derogatorily as “women’s literature,” Pride and Prejudice is considered among the first great English novels and Austen the first great novelist. Austen as a published writer was among a select few that deviated from the normal social conventions of marriage and money. Austen herself never married, and she supported herself through writing—a lifestyle that was more or less scandalous for a woman during her time. Furthermore, the character of Elizabeth Bennet can be viewed as pro-feminist as she is perhaps the most outspoken and headstrong character of all of Austen’s novels. She exerts herself when struggling over her feelings towards men, and Mr. Darcy in particular, in a way the other characters seem incapable of:

Oh! If that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Herfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all.” (Austen 137)

The Feminist perspective here may borrow from the Marxists in that the character of Elizabeth Bennet as imagined by Austin must be some reflection of her own thoughts—her consciousness creates both her own life and inevitably influences her novels.

For those who do not appreciate the work of Jane Austen, it is probable that her wit and irony is lost on them. Jane Austen’s sensibility and intellect—two scandalous qualities for a woman to have—created a world of fiction that Austen herself was both within and without, as she never had her happy ending like in her novels. Regardless of one’s taste for her work or not, Austen is responsible for the popular form of the novel we have today, and for that alone she should be admired and praised.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Oxford, 2003. Print.

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Jane Austen. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 18 Nov. 2013.

Kelly, Gary. British Romantic Novelists, 1789-1832. Ed. Bradford Keyes Mudge. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 116. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.

Myer, Valerie Grosvenor. Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart. New York: Arcade, 2013. Print .

Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. New York: Oxford, 2001. Print.

Southam, B. C. Jane Austen : The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 2003. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 18 Nov. 2013.

Todd, Janet. “Introduction.” Sensibility. London: Methuen, 1989. 1-31. Print.