Jane Austen
During her placid life Miss Austen never allowed her literary work to interfere with her domestic duties: sewing much and admirably, keeping house, writing many letters and reading aloud. Though, however, her days were quiet and her area circumscribed, she saw enough of middle-class provincial society to find a basis on which her dramatic and humorous faculties might build, and such was her power of searching observation and her sympathetic imagination that there are not in English fiction more faithful representations of the life she knew than we possess in her novels. She had no predecessors in this genre. Miss Austen's little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which she worked with so fine a brush--her own phrases--was her own invention.
Her best-known, if not her best work, Pride and Prejudice, was also her first. It was written between October 1796 and August 1797, although, such was the blindness of publishers, not issued until 1813, two years after Sense and Sensibility, which was written, on an old scenario called Eleanor and Marianne, in 1797 and 1798. Miss Austen's inability to find a publisher for these stories, and for Northanger Abbey, written in 1798 (although it is true that she sold that MS. in 1803 for £10 to a Bath bookseller, only, however, to see it locked away in a safe for some years, to be gladly resold to her later), seems to have damped her ardour; for there is no evidence that between 1798 and 1809 she wrote anything but the fragment called The Watsons, after which year she began to revise her early work for the press. Her other three books belong to a later date--Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion being written between 1811 and 1816. The years of publication were Sense and Sensibility, 1811; Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Mansfield Park, 1814; and Emma, 1816--all in their author's lifetime. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818. All were anonymous, agreeably to their author's retiring disposition. (E.V.L.)
Although Northanger Abbey was drafted in 1798-99, after the first versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had been written, it received less radical revision than those works and consequently represents an early phase of Jane Austen's art, when high-spirited social and literary satire was mixed with a growing sense of more mature themes. Jane Austen sold the manuscript to a publisher in 1803, but it was never printed, perhaps because the fashion for gothic fiction was already declining. When Jane Austen prepared an Advertisement for the novel in 1816, shortly before her death, she asked the public "to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes" (NA, p. 10). Time has proved this apology unnecessary. Although the books that she mocks and the manners she satirizes now seem remote and quaint, her basic themes--the constant desire to substitute illusion for reality, the interdependence of spiritual and material values--remain fresh and compelling. It is one of the deeper ironies of Northanger Abbey that the gothic violence that Catherine imagines is dispelled, only to be replaced by a more rational view of the world that is almost as dark.
Jane Austen Facts
Occupation | Writer |
Birthday | December 16, 1775 |
Sign | Sagittarius |
Birthplace | Steventon, United Kingdom |
Date of death | July 18, 1817 (age 41) |
Selected Filmography
Jane Austen's Emma | ||
Love & Friendship | ||
Persuasion | ||
The Jane Austen Book Club | ||
Pride and Prejudice | ||
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont | ||
Scents and Sensibility | ||
Emma | ||
Northanger Abbey | ||
Episode 1 | ||
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