Jane Austen

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Jane Austen
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Jane Austen

• Jane Austen   (1775 - 1817)
• Category  English LiteratureBorn  December
  16, 1775Steventon, Hampshire, EnglandDied
   July 18, 1817Winchester, Hampshire, England

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An Austen Chronology

• 1775 Jane Austen born at village of Steventon,
  England, to George and Cassandra Austen.
• 1785-1787 With her sister, Cassandra, Austen
  attends the Abbey School in Reading, England.
• 1790-93 Writes her juvenilia.
• 1795-98 Writes original versions of Northanger
  Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and
  Prejudice.
• 1797 "First Impressions" (original version of
  Pride and Prejudice) rejected by a London
  publisher.
• 1801 Father retires and moves to Bath with his
  wife and daughters.
• 1803 Susan (original version of Northanger Abbey)
  is bought by a publisher but never issued.
• 1804 Austen begins, and quickly abandons, "The
  Watsons."
• 1805 Death of father, George.
• 1808 Moves to Southampton with mother and sister.
  
• 1809-17 Lives with her mother and sister in a
  small house provided by her wealthy brother
  Edward in the village of Chawton, in southern
  England. Begins revising original versions of
  Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.
• 1811 Sense and Sensibility published.
• 1813 Pride and Prejudice published.
• 1814 Mansfield Park published. Austen begins work
  on Emma.
• 1816 Emma is published and is dedicated to the
  Prince Regent (future George IV) at his request.
  Austen completes Persuasion.
• 1817 Composes the fragment "Sanditon" abandons
  it because of incapacitating illness. Austen is
  moved to Winchester for medical care in May and
  dies there on 18 July. Buried in Winchester
  Cathedral on 24 July.
• 1818 Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published
  jointly in a four-volume edition, with a
  biographical preface of Austen by her brother
  Henry.

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Education and Background

• Jane Austen was the fifth child in a family of
  seven. She had one sister, Cassandra. Jane's
  first home was Steventon Rectory in North
  Hampshire where her father had the living of
  Deane Parish. Money was not in abundance and
  Jane's father supplemented his income with
  teaching. It was a lively and warm family who
  entertained each other with reading aloud and
  play acting. In 1800, Jane's father decided to
  retire and in 1801 moved with Mrs Austen, Jane
  and Cassandra to Bath.
• After the death of Jane's father in 1805, Mrs
  Austen, Cassandra and Jane moved again - this
  time to Southampton. In 1809, they moved back to
  Hampshire, this time to Chawton.
• Jane was encouraged to read widely at home,
  including the novels of Fielding, Richardson and
  Johnson. At age seven she first attended school
  with her older sister Cassandra. Between
  approximately 1782-87 the two girls attended
  schools in Oxford, Southampton and Reading. Jane
  could read French and some Italian, play the
  piano, sing and dance.

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LIFE STORIES (1)

• 10/30/1811
• Jane Austen "If I am a wild beast I cannot help
  it"On this day in 1811, Jane Austen's first
  novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published.
  Early reviewers found it to be "a genteel,
  well-written novel" as far as "domestic
  literature" went, and "just long enough to
  interest without fatiguing." Virginia Woolf would
  take a different view "Sometimes it seems as if
  her creatures were born merely to give Jane
  Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads
  off."

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LIFE STORIES (2)

• 3/29/1815
• Jane Austen, Emma, and the Prince of WalesOn
  this day in 1815, Jane Austen completed Emma, her
  fourth novel in five years, and the last to
  appear in her lifetime. That it appeared with a
  dedication to the Prince Regent, a person whose
  debauched lifestyle Austen had condemned, and a
  type she would normally satirize, is a story that
  might itself have stepped from one of her books.

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LIFE STORIES (3)

• 7/18/1817
• Jane Austen RemainderedOn this day in 1817, Jane
  Austen died, at the age of forty-one. She had
  been increasingly ill over the previous year and
  a half, probably from a hormonal disorder like
  Addison's Disease. Austen's devoted older sister,
  Cassandra, inherited all the author's papers,
  from which she expurgated some but not all of
  Jane's enduring wit and one-liners.

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PORTRAITS OF JANE AUSTEN

• There have been only two authentic surviving
  portraits of Jane Austen, both by her sister
  Cassandra, one of which is a back view! The other
  is a rather disappointing pen and wash drawing
  made about 1810. The main picture of Jane Austen
  presented on the first page is a much more
  aesthetically pleasing adaptation of the same
  portrait, but should be viewed with caution,
  since it is not the original (for a more
  sentimentalized Victorian version of this
  portrait, see this image, and for an even sillier
  version of the portrait, in which poor Jane has a
  rather pained expression and is decked out in
  cloth-of-gold or something, see this image -- for
  some strange reason, it is this last picture
  which has been frequently used to illustrate
  popular media articles on Jane Austen).

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Jane Austen's Art (I) Feminism in Jane Austen(1)

• Jane Austen a feminist? That has not been the
  traditional view,but once the question has been
  asked, it is not hard to see some feminist
  tendencies.
• Of course, Jane Austen is not a simple ideologue
  -- when a character in a Jane Austen novel makes
  a broad statement that seems to stand up for
  women in general, this is actually usually done
  by an unsympathetic character and is not meant to
  be taken seriously. In Pride and Prejudice the
  main example is Caroline Bingley's statement to
  Darcy that "Eliza Bennet is one of those young
  ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the
  other sex by undervaluing their own, and with
  many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But, in my
  opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art."
  Here Caroline Bingley is "undervaluing"
  Elizabeth, and Darcy sees through her easily.

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Jane Austen's Art (I) Feminism in Jane Austen(2)

• On the other hand, however, Jane Austen presents
  a rather cool and objective view of the limited
  options open to women (in Pride and Prejudice
  this is done through the character Charlotte
  Lucas).
• And it has been pointed out that Jane Austen
  makes an implicit statement by simply
  disregarding certain strictures of her era that
  may not be obvious to modern readers. For example
  most of Jane Austen's heroines don't have anyone
  whom they can confide in, or whose advice they
  can rely on, about certain delicate matters. Thus
  they must make their own decisions more or less
  independently (for example, Elizabeth Bennet
  doesn't reveal to Jane, her sister and closest
  confidante, her changed feelings about Darcy
  until he has actually proposed again, and she has
  accepted).

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Jane Austen's Art (II)Marriage and the
Alternatives The Status of Women(1)

• In Jane Austens time, there was no real way for
  young women of the "genteel" classes to strike
  out on their own or be independent. Professions,
  the universities, politics, etc. were not open to
  women. Few occupations were open to them -- and
  those few that were (such as being a governess,
  i.e. a live-in teacher for the daughters or young
  children of a family) were not highly respected,
  and did not generally pay well or have very good
  working conditions.
• Therefore most "genteel" women could not get
  money except by marrying for it or inheriting it.
  Only a rather small number of women were what
  could be called professionals, who though their
  own efforts earned an income sufficient to make
  themselves independent, or had a recognized
  career.

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Jane Austen's Art (II) Marriage and the
Alternatives The Status of Women(2)

• Therefore, a woman who did not marry could
  generally only look forward to living with her
  relatives as a dependant' (more or less Jane
  Austen's situation), so that marriage is pretty
  much the only way of ever getting out from under
  the parental roof -- unless, of course, her
  family could not support her, in which case she
  could face the unpleasant necessity of going to
  live with employers as a dependant' governess or
  teacher, or hired "lady's companion".
• Given all this, some women were willing to marry
  just because marriage was the only allowed route
  to financial security, or to escape an
  uncongenial family situation.

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Notes on Jane Austen's relationship to the
society of her day(1)

• The dramatic power of her characters led some
  nineteenth-century writers, including Macaulay
  and George Lewes, to regard her as no less than a
  "prose Shakespeare. She transformed the
  eighteenth-century novel--which could be a clumsy
  and primitive performance--into a work of art.
  She invented her own special mode of fiction, the
  domestic comedy of middle-class manners, a
  dramatic, realistic account of the quiet
  backwaters of everyday life for the country
  families of Regency England from the late 1790s
  until 1815 .
• The novels communicate a profound sense of the
  movement in English history--when the old
  Georgian world of the eighteenth century was
  being carried uneasily and reluctantly into the
  new world of Regency England, the Augustan world
  into the romantic.

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Notes on Jane Austen's relationship to the
society of her day(2)

• Historically, the novels are a challenge to the
  idea of society as a civilizing force and to the
  image of man's fulfillment as an enlightened
  social being. They question the driving optimism
  of the period--that this, in the development of
  English society, was triumphantly the Age of
  Improvement. Improvement was the leading spirit
  of Regency England, its self-awarded palm.
  Certainly it was unequaled as a period of
  economic improvement, in the wake of the
  industrial revolution. The wartime economy
  accelerated this new prosperity. Alongside this
  material improvement there was an air of
  self-conscious, self-congratulatory improvement
  in manners, in religious zeal, in morality, in
  the popularization of science, philosophy, and
  the arts. It was the age of encyclopedias,
  displaying the scope and categories of human
  knowledge in digestible form. Books and essays
  paraded "Improvement" in their titles.

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Notes on Jane Austen's relationship to the
society of her day(3)

• Ironically, one of Jane Austen's major
  achievements in the novels is to have captured
  the total illusion of the gentry's vision, the
  experience of living in privileged isolation, of
  being party to a privileged outlook, of belonging
  to a privileged community, whose distresses, such
  as they are, are private, mild, and genteel. Each
  of the homes and neighborhoods is its own "little
  social commonwealth," a microcosm, the center of
  a minute universe. The irony is implicit. The
  miniature issues of these little worlds, so
  realistic, so much the center of the stage, vivid
  and magnified to the point of surrealism, imply
  another, larger world beyond "The depression and
  misery" of the common people was a theme she
  could never handle directly her way was to treat
  it by silent implication. It is with such
  momentary and glancing allusions that Jane Austen
  reminds the reader of England unseen, which lies
  beyond the blinkered social focus of the gentry's
  vision. But these are pinpoints of light. There
  was another "depression and misery" that she knew
  more intimately, and cold command fully and
  creatively. This was the private, personal
  history of women like herself, trapped and
  stifled within the confines of a hothouse
  society, recognizing its brittleness and
  artificiality, but with no other world to exist
  in.

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Notes on Jane Austen's relationship to the
society of her day(4)
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Jane Austens limitation

• Jane Austen limited her subject-matter in a
  number of ways in her six novels. Many of these
  limitations are due to her artistic integrity in
  not describing what she herself was not
  personally familiar with (or in avoiding clichéd
  plot devices common in the literature of her
  day).
• She never handles the (conventionally masculine)
  topic of politics.
• She never uses servants, small tradesmen,
  cottagers, etc. as more than purely incidental
  characters. Conversely, she does not describe the
  high nobility, and she does not describe London
  high society.
• She confines herself to the general territory
  that she herself has visited and is familiar
  with.
• In her novels there is no violence and no crime.
  
• She never uses certain hackneyed plot devices
  then common, such as mistaken identities,
  doubtful and/or aristocratic parentage, and
  hidden-then-rediscovered wills.

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SELECTED WORKS BY THIS AUTHOR

• Emmafiction
• Jane Austen's Lettersletters

• Pride and Prejudicefiction
• Sense and Sensibilityfiction

FIND BOOKS BY JANE AUSTEN ATAmazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk, chapters.indigo.ca
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Jane Austens Novels and Publishing Dates

• Sense and Sensibility(1811)
• Elinor and Marianne(1796)
• Pride and Prejudice(1813)
• First Impression (1795)
• Mansfield Park???????(1814)
• Emma ??(1816)
• Northanger Abbey????(1818)
• Persuasion ?? (1818)
• Lady Susan(1798 or 1799)

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Pride and Prejudice
Published in 1813, is Jane's Austen's earliest
work, and in some senses also one of her most
mature works. Austen began writing the novel in
1796 at the age of twenty-one, under the title
First Impressions. The original version of the
novel was probably in the form of an exchange of
letters. Austen's father had offered he
manuscript for publication in 1797, but the
publishing company refused to even consider it.
Shortly after completing First Impressions,
Austen began writing Sense and Sensibility, which
was not published until 1811. She also wrote some
minor works during that time, which were later
expanded into full novels. Between 1810 and 1812
Pride and Prejudice was rewritten for
publication. While the original ideas of the
novel come from a girl of 21, the final version
has the literary and thematic maturity of a
thirty-five year old woman who has spent years
painstakingly drafting and revising, as is the
pattern with all of Austen's works. Pride and
Prejudice is usually considered to be the most
popular of Austen's novels.

• The Chinese Version of Our Text (.doc)

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Themes of pride and prejudice

• Women and Marriage Austen is critical of the
  gender injustices present in 19th century English
  society. The novel demonstrates how money such as
  Charlotte need to marry men they are not in love
  with simply in order to gain financial security.
  The entailment of the Longbourn estate is an
  extreme hardship on the Bennet family, and is
  quite obviously unjust. The entailment of Mr.
  Bennet's estate leaves his daughters in a poor
  financial situation which both requires them to
  marry and makes it more difficult to marry well.
  Clearly, Austen believes that woman are at least
  as intelligent and capable as men, and considers
  their inferior status in society to be unjust.
  She herself went against convention by remaining
  single and earning a living through her novels.
  In her personal letters Austen advises friends
  only to marry for love. Through the plot of the
  novel it is clear that Austen wants to show how
  Elizabeth is able to be happy by refusing to
  marry for financial purposes and only marrying a
  man whom she truly loves and esteems.

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Her Works on TV
Pride and Prejudice
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
Emma
Mansfield Park
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Jane Austen Quotes

• In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show
  more affection than she feels.
• With men he can be rational and unaffected, but
  when he has ladies to please, every feature
  works.
• For what do we live, but to make sport for our
  neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
• Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
• There is safety in reserve, but no attraction.
  One cannot love a reserved person.
• Human nature is so well disposed towards those
  who are in interesting situations, that a young
  person, who either marries or dies, is sure of
  being kindly spoken of.
• An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a
  disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her
  cares are over, and she feels that she may exert
  all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All
  is safe with a lady engaged no harm can be done.

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(No Transcript)
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Jane Austen Character Quiz(1)

• 1) You are out in the countryside. What are you
  most likely to be doing? a Walking, running and
  skipping b Chasing the local talent. c
  Chatting with your best friend d Falling over.
• 2) Somebody slights you or your family. What do
  you do? a Nobody would slight you. Youre far
  too well respected. b Run out of the room. c
  Give a sharp, witty, reply. d Ignore it, like
  you do everything else.
• 3) You are rejected by the one you love. What do
  you do? a Hope that he will come back and
  return your love. b Spend weeks crying and
  mourning c Set about changing his mind - youre
  good at things like that. d Move on to someone
  else straight away.
• 4) You receive unwanted attentions from a man -
  what is your reaction? a No attentions are
  unwanted in your case - you revel in it. b
  Refuse him and try to set him up with your best
  friend. c Ignore him then laugh at him behind
  his back. dTell him hes the worst man youve
  ever known.

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Jane Austen Character Quiz(2)

• 5) What are your favourite past times? a
  Matchmaking your friends and also a little music
  and painting.. bDancing and flirting.
  cReading and walking d Playing the piano and
  reading poetry.
• 6) What type of man do you go for? a Tall, dark
  and proud. b Well respected and dependable. c
  Intelligent, good-humoured and respected. d Any
  that happens to come along.
• 7) Who are you closest to? a Your mother. b A
  sister or a friend. c No one really - youre
  too busy having fun. d Your father.
• 8) You find out that someone close to you is
  going to be married - what do you think? aShe
  could do better b You are ecstatic and cant
  stop saying how happy you are. c Does that mean
  there will be a ball? dYoull be sorry to lose
  her but feel happy for her sake.

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Jane Austen Character Quiz(3)
9) What job appeals to you most? a Running a
party agency or a nightclub. b Having your own
column in a newspaper. c Running a dating
agency. d A theatre critic or actress. 10)
What were you favourite subjects at school? a
English and Psychology. b Art and music. c
Drama, music and English Lit. d You had too
much fun to be bothered with lessons.  
ANSWERS 1- a L b Y c E d M
2 - a E b M c L d Y
3 - a L b M c E d Y
4 - a Y b E c M d L
5 - a E b Y c L d M
6 - a L b M c E d Y
7 - a M b L c Y d E
8 - a E b M c Y d L
9 - a Y b L c E d M
10 - a L b E c M d Y
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Jane Austen Character Quiz(4)

• If you got mostly L you are Elizabeth Bennet.
  You are spirited and quick-witted. You like
  nothing more than to be outdoors in the fresh air
  or at a lively ball, however, you are also able
  to enjoy your own company at home with a book.
  You are stubborn, but fair and loved by all those
  around you. You love to make jokes and laugh at
  nonsensical things,and tease people but you
  detest snobbery of any kind and wont be
  patronised by people who think themselves
  superior to you.
• If you got mostly Y you are Lydia Bennet The
  main object in your life is to have fun. You are
  a flirt and you love being in the centre of
  attention. You are happy, lively and
  good-humoured. You love dancing and going out,
  you hate having to stay at home in the evenings.
  You can get carried away and will please yourself
  at the expense of others. You dont take into
  account other peoples feelings, as long as
  something makes you happy. You are spontanious
  and energentic, but can be a bit of a gossip.