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Jane Austen

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Jane Austen

   Jane Austen, in a portrait based on one drawn by her sister Cassandra.
   Born: 16 December 1775
   Steventon, Hampshire, England
   Died: 18 July 1817
   Winchester, Hampshire, England
   Occupation(s): Novelist

   Jane Austen ( 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist.
   Her insights into women's lives and her mastery of form and irony have
   made her one of the most noted and influential novelists of her era
   despite being only moderately successful during her lifetime.

Life

   In 1775, Jane Austen was born at a rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, one
   of two daughters of the Rev. George Austen (1731–1805) and his wife
   Cassandra (née Leigh) (1739–1827). Her brothers James and Henry
   followed in the path of their father and joined the clergy (the latter
   towards the end of his life after a successful career as a banker),
   while Francis and Charles both pursued naval careers. She also had a
   sister, Cassandra, with whom she maintained a close relationship
   throughout her life. The abundant correspondence between the sisters
   provides historians with the greatest insight into Austen's past. The
   only undisputed portrait of Jane Austen is a somewhat rudimentary
   coloured sketch done by Cassandra, which currently resides in the
   National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1783, she was educated briefly by
   a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton, and finally in 1785–1786
   attended the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in
   Reading, Berkshire. This uncommonly advanced level of education may
   have contributed to her early proclivity towards writing, and she began
   her first novel in 1789. This was also due to her family life, though.
   The Austen family often enacted plays, which gave Jane an opportunity
   to present her stories. They also rented novels out of the local
   library, which influenced Austen's writings. She was encouraged to
   write especially by her brother Henry, who wrote a little himself.
   "Cottage" where Jane Austen lived during the last 8 years of her life
   (today a museum)
   Enlarge
   "Cottage" where Jane Austen lived during the last 8 years of her life
   (today a museum)
   Jane Austen's family coat of arms (click on image for more
   information).
   Enlarge
   Jane Austen's family coat of arms (click on image for more
   information).

   Austen's life was even less eventful than that of her characters. In
   1801 the family moved to the socially esteemed spa city of Bath, which
   provides the setting for many of her novels; though Jane Austen, like
   her character Anne Elliot, seemed to have "persisted in a
   disinclination for Bath", although her dislike may have been influenced
   by the family's precarious financial situation in that city. In 1802
   Austen received a marriage proposal from a wealthy but "big and
   awkward" man named Harris Bigg-Wither, who was six years her junior.
   Such a marriage would have freed her from some of the constraints and
   dependency then associated with the role of a spinster. Such
   considerations may have influenced her initially to accept his offer,
   only to change her mind and refuse him the following day. It seems
   clear that she did not love him. After the death of her father in 1805,
   Austen, her sister, and her mother lived in Southampton with her
   brother Frank and his family for several years before moving to Chawton
   in 1809. Here her wealthy brother Edward had an estate with a cottage,
   where he allowed his mother and sisters to live. This home is now a
   museum and is a popular site for tourists and literary pilgrims alike.

   Austen lived at Chawton, and wrote her later novels there. In 1816, she
   began to suffer from ill-health. In May 1817 she moved to Winchester to
   be closer to her doctor. It is now thought by some that she may have
   suffered from Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands that
   was often caused by tuberculosis. The disease was at that time unnamed.
   Others, such as one of her biographers, Carol Shields, have
   hypothesized that she died from breast cancer. Her condition became
   increasingly unstable, and on July 18, 1817 she died at the age of
   forty-one and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Work

   Austen's best-known work is Pride and Prejudice, which is viewed as an
   exemplar of her socially astute comedies of manners. Austen also wrote
   a satire of the popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Northanger
   Abbey, which was published posthumously.

   Adhering to a common contemporary practice for female authors, Austen
   published her novels anonymously; her anonymity kept her out of leading
   literary circles.

   Austen's comedies of manners, especially Emma, are often cited for
   their perfection of form. Modern critics continue to unearth new
   perspectives on Austen's keen commentary regarding the predicament of
   unmarried genteel English women in the late 1790s and early 1800s, a
   consequence of inheritance law and custom, which usually directed the
   bulk of a family's fortune to eldest male heirs.

   Although Austen's career coincided with the Romantic movement in
   literature, she was not an intensely passionate Romantic. Passionate
   emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel: the young woman who
   exercises twice a day is more likely to find real happiness than one
   who irrationally elopes with a capricious lover. Austen's artistic
   values had more in common with David Hume and John Locke than with her
   contemporaries William Wordsworth or Lord Byron. Among Austen's
   influences were Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Samuel Richardson,
   George Crabbe and Fanny Burney.

   Although Austen did not privilege passionate emotion as did other
   Romantic movement writers, she was also skeptical of its opposite --
   excessive calculation and practicality often leads to disaster in
   Austen novels.
   In 1816, the editors of the New Monthly Magazine didn't see Emma as an
   important novel.
   Enlarge
   In 1816, the editors of the New Monthly Magazine didn't see Emma as an
   important novel.

Criticism

   Austen's novels received only moderate renown when they were published,
   though Sir Walter Scott in particular praised her work:

          "That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of
          feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most
          wonderful I ever met with."

   In Austen's final novel Persuasion, several characters read a work by
   Scott and praise it, but Marianne Dashwood in " Sense and Sensibility"
   had already counted Scott as one of her favorites.

   Austen also earned the admiration of Macaulay (who thought that in the
   world there were no compositions which approached nearer to
   perfection), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Sydney Smith,
   Edward FitzGerald, and the Prince Regent, who even managed to get her
   to visit him at Brighton. Twentieth century scholars rank her among the
   greatest literary geniuses of the English language, sometimes even
   comparing her to Shakespeare. Lionel Trilling and Edward Said have both
   written treaties on Austen's works. Said referred extensively to
   Mansfield Park in his 1993 work, Culture and Imperialism.

   Trilling wrote in an essay on Mansfield Park:

   "It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern
   personality and the culture in which it had its being. Never before had
   the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it
   been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. Hegel
   speaks of the "secularization of spirituality" as a prime
   characteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to
   tell us what this involves. She is the first novelist to represent
   society, the general culture, as playing a part in the moral life,
   generating the concepts of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" which no earlier
   time would have understood the meaning of, and which for us are so
   subtle that they defy definition, and so powerful that none can escape
   their sovereignty. She is the first to be aware of the Terror which
   rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which
   we respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our
   secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous
   and obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and
   styles to the question ..."

   Negative views of Austen have been notable, with more demanding
   detractors frequently accusing her writing of being unliterary and
   middle-brow. Charlotte Brontë criticized the narrow scope of Austen's
   fiction:

          "Anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic,
          poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these
          works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with
          a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as 'outré' or
          extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of
          the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a
          Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She
          ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with
          nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she
          rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood
          ... What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her
          to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the
          blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the
          sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores....Jane
          Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very
          incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman, if this
          is heresy--I cannot help it."

   Mark Twain's reaction was revulsion:

          "Jane Austen? Why, I go so far as to say that any library is a
          good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even
          if it contains no other book."

   But Rudyard Kipling felt differently, going so far as to write the
   short story "The Janeites" about a group of soldiers who were also
   Austen fans, as well as two poems praising "England's Jane" and
   providing her with posthumous true love.

   Austen's literary strength lies in the delineation of character,
   especially of women, by delicate touches arising out of the most
   natural and everyday incidents in the life of the middle and upper
   classes, from which her subjects are generally taken. Her characters,
   though of quite ordinary types, are drawn with such firmness and
   precision, and with such significant detail as to retain their
   individuality intact through their entire development, and they are
   uncoloured by her own personality. Her view of life seems largely
   genial, with a strong dash of gentle but keen irony.

   Some contemporary readers may find the world she describes, in which
   people's chief concern is obtaining advantageous marriages, unliberated
   and disquieting. In her era options were limited, and both women and
   men often married for financial considerations. Female writers worked
   within the similarly narrow genre of romance. Part of Austen's
   prominent reputation rests on how well she integrates observations on
   the human condition within a convincing love story. Much of the tension
   in her novels arises from balancing financial necessity against other
   concerns: love, friendship, honour and self-respect. It is also
   important to point out that, at the time, romance novels were seen as a
   clever modern variation on the knightly romances of medieval times;
   these were damsels engaged in adventure, seeking their fortunes and
   carrying out quests.

   There are two museums dedicated to Jane Austen. The Jane Austen Centre
   in Bath is a public museum located in a Georgian House in Gay Street,
   just a few doors down the street from number 25 where Austen stayed in
   1805. The Jane Austen's House Museum is located in Chawton cottage, in
   Hampshire, where Austen lived from 1809 to 1817.

Filmography

   In popular culture, Austen's novels have been adapted in a great number
   of film and television series, varying greatly in their faithfulness to
   the originals. Pride and Prejudice has been the most reproduced of her
   works, with six films, the most recent being the 2005 adaptation
   directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Bennett),
   Donald Sutherland (Mr. Bennett), Matthew Macfadyen (Mr. Darcy), and
   Dame Judi Dench (Lady Catherine de Bourgh), as well as the 2004
   Bollywood adaptation Bride & Prejudice. There is also a 1940 film
   version of the novel starring Laurence Oliver as Mr. Darcy, and Greer
   Garson as Elizabeth Bennett. Previously, there were five television
   series produced by the BBC, the most noteworthy being the well-loved
   1995 version, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. The 2001 film
   Bridget Jones's Diary included characters and plot line inspired by the
   novel, though it is to be noted that this movie was based on a novel by
   Helen Fielding.

   Emma has been adapted on television several times, first in 1948.
   Recent versions include a 1972 British television version, the 1996
   film Emma, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam, and also in 1996 on
   British television with Kate Beckinsale. The 1995 film Clueless,
   directed by Amy Heckerling and starring Alicia Silverstone, is a
   modernization of Emma in a California high school setting.

   Sense and Sensibility has been made into four films including the 1995
   version, from a screenplay adapted by Emma Thompson (who won the
   Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay); it was directed by Ang Lee
   and starred Thompson and Kate Winslet. Persuasion has been adapted into
   two television series and one feature film. Mansfield Park and
   Northanger Abbey have both been made into films. The 1980 film Jane
   Austen in Manhattan is about rival stage companies who wish to produce
   the only complete Austen play "Sir Charles Grandison" (from the
   Richardson novel of the same title), which was rediscovered in 1980.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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