Jane Austen

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Jane Austen

1775-1817

Novelist

Early Years. Jane Austen was Hampshire, England, where her father, George Austen, was a rector in the local parish church. As an Anglican clergyman, he earned a modest income. The rectory was home not only to George Austen, his wife, Cassandra, andtheir eight children, but also to pupils George Austen tutored to earn extra money. Jane Austen’ education was informal, relatively brief, and no more rigorous than the schooling given to most girls of her time and social class. In 1782 she accompanied her older sister, Cassandra, and a cousin to study in the home of an aunt named Mrs. Ann Cawley, first in Oxford and then in Southampton. They remained with Mrs. Cawley until autumn 1783. In 1784 the sisters were sent to a girls’ boarding school in Reading, which was similar to Mrs. Goddard’ s casual school in Austen’ novel Emma (1815), and remained there until December 1786. The rest of Austen’ education occurred at home, where she learned to play the piano and to draw. Neither Jane nor Cassandra Austen ever married.

Reading. Above all, Jane Austen was an active reader of nonfiction as well as a less-respectable and relatively new form, the novel. Apparently, her entire family delved into the books in her father’s substantial library, for she later wrote that everyone in her family were “great novel readers, and not ashamed of being so.” She read the epistolary novels of seduction and betrayal by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), the often bawdy books of Henry Fielding (1707–1754), and the fiction of the most popular female writer of her time, Fanny Burney (1752–1840). Indeed, Austen had great respect for women writers, and in her “Defense of the Novel,” which was included in North anger Abbey (1818), all three of the novels she explicitly praised were by women: Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) by Burney and Belinda (1801) by Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849).

The Classics. While her family was living in Bath in 1803, Jane Austen sold her first novel, Northanger Abbey, for only £10 to a publisher who later decided not to publish it. Several decades would pass before writers such as Honore de Balzac (1799–1850), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), and Emile Zola (1840–1902) were able toearn comfortable incomes just from writing. Though Austen never achieved financial independence, she continued to write novels and sell them. In 1805 her father died, leaving his wife and unmarried daughters with only a meager income and largely dependent on the Austen brothers. The three women lived for a time with brother Frank Austen in Southampton, and in 1809 they moved to Chawton in Hampshire (not far from Steventon), where they were provided a small house on the estate of brother Edward, who had been adopted by a wealthy cousin. Jane Austen wrote little in Bath and not at all inSouthampton, but once back in Hampshire she wrote ceaselessly. She revised a 1795–1796 manuscript as Sense and Sensibility (1811) and a 1797 work as Pride and Prejudice and began Mansfield Park (1814). In 1810 a publisher accepted Sense and Sensibility but agreed toprint it only if Austen agreed to pay printing costs if the book did not break even. It eventually earned her the modest sum of £140. The novel appeared anonymously, with “By a Lady” on the title page, and during her lifetime her subsequent novels were attributed to “the author of” one or two of her previous works. She then sold Pride and Prejudice—which she called her “own darling child”—in November 1812, and it was published two months later. At first only her family knew of her authorship, but the secret could not be kept for long. On hearing a group of Scottish ladies praise Pride and Prejudice, Jane’ brother Henry revealed that his sister was the author. She had sold Pride and Prejudice for the flat fee of £110 and so earned no royalties from it, even when a second edition was published in autumn 1813, along with a second edition of Sense and Sensibility. By this time Austen’s books were attracting attention, and when Mansfield Park was published in 1814, the first edition sold out in six months. She then started to write Emma, which some literary critics have praised more highly than Pride and Prejudice, and saw it published in 1815, the same year she started Persuasion (1818).

Death. Austen’s writing career came to an end when she became seriously ill with what was probably Addison’s disease, a tubercular disease of the kidneys. Sister Cassandra was at her side when she died in 1817.She was buried in Winchester Cathedral.Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously the following year.

Between Classicism and Realism. Writing in domestic tranquility in rural Hampshire, Jane Austen honed her skills as a keen observer of middle-class provincial society. She was the first novelist to focus on the trivial comedy of provincial family life, through which she examined the perplexities of emotion and conduct. She followed Richardson in the minute presentation of daily life but avoided his weeping emotionalism. Like Fielding, she treated subjects with a comic-ironic detached attitude; and, like Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) as well as Fielding, she retained a psychological closeness to the inner world of her characters. Characterization was becoming more important than plot in some Romantic novels, and Jane Austen was the first great novelist to combine harmoniously in her narrative the internal and external formation of character. In this sense her fiction is both a climax of the eighteenth-century novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Defoe and a harbinger of the Realists of the nineteenth century, Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola. Novelist Walter Scott (1771–1832) said of Austen well after her death, “That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like any one going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.” Later in the century, Henry James (1843–1916) made a comment about women writers in general that applies to Austen in particular, as James intended:“women are delicate and patient observers; they hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They feel and perceive the real with a kind of personal tact, and their observations are recorded in a thousand delightful volumes.”.