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English writer, who first gave the novel its modern character through
the treatment of everyday life. Although Austen was widely read
in her lifetime, she published her works anonymously. The most urgent
preoccupation of her young, well-bred heroines is courtship, and
finally marriage. Austen's best-known books include PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
(1813) and EMMA (1816).
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man
in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
(from Pride and Prejudice, 1813)
 Jane
Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father was a
rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family
of eight. The first 25 years of her life Austen spent in Hampshire.
She was tutored at home. Her parents were avid readers and she received
a broader education than many women of her time. On her father's
retirement, the family moved to Bath.
Austen started to write for family amusement as a child. Her earliest-known
writings date from about 1787. Very shy about her writing, she wrote
on small pieces of paper that she slipped under the desk plotter
if anyone came into the room. After the death of her father in 1805,
she lived with her mother and sister in Southampton and moved in
1809 to a large cottage in the village of Chawton. Austen never
married.
In Chawton Austen started to write her major works, among them
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters,
Marianne and Elinor, who try to find proper husbands to secure their
social position. The novel was written in 1797 as the revision of
a sketch called Elinor and Marianne, composed when the author was
20. Austen's heroines are determined to marry wisely and well, but
romantic Marianne is a character who feels intensely about everything
and loses her heart to an irresponsible seducer. "I could not
be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide
with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same with books,
the same music must charm us both." Reasonable Elinor falls
in love with a gentleman already engaged. '"I have frequently
detected myself in such kind of mistakes," said Elinor, "in a total
misapprehension of character in some point or another: fancying
people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they
really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what the deception originated.
Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very
frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself
time to deliberate and judge."'
 In
all of Austen's novels her heroines are ultimately married. Pride
and Prejudice described the clash between Elisabeth Bennet, the
daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich aristocratic
landowner. Their relationship starts from dislike but at last they
fall in love and are happily united. In 1998 appeared a sequel to
the novel, entitled Desire and Duty, written by Teddy F. Bader,
et al. It followed the ideas Jane Austen told her family. Emma was
written in comic tone and told the story of Emma Woodhouse, who
finds her destiny in marriage. During the story Emma, a snobbish
young woman, develops into someone capable of feeling and love.
Austen focused on middle-class provincial life with humor and understanding.
She depicted the life of minor landed gentry, country clergymen
and their families, in which marriage mainly determined women's
social status. Of her six great novels, four were published anonymously
during her lifetime. At her death on July 18, 1817 in Winchester,
Austen was writing the unfinished SANDITON. Austen was buried in
Winchester Cathedral.
Austen's brother Henry made her authorship public after her death.
Emma had been reviewed favourably by Sir Walter Scott, who wrote
in his journal of March 14, 1826: "[Miss Austen] had a talent for
describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary
life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The
Big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite
touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters
interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment,
is denied to me." Charlotte Brontë and E.B. Browning found her limited.
It was not until the publication of J.E. Austen-Leigh's Memoir in
1870 that a Jane Austen cult began to develop. Austen's unfinished
Sanditon was published in 1925.
Emma - a novel begun in January 1814 and completed in
March of the next year. Published in three volumes in 1815. The
protagonist, Emma Woodhouse, is a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied
young woman. She is left alone with her hypochondriac father.
Her governess, Miss Taylor, marries a neighbour, Mr. Weston, and
blind to her own feelings, he indulges himself with meddlesome
and unsuccessful attempts at matchmaking among her friends and
neighbours. She makes a protégée of Harriet Smith, an illegitimate
girl of no social status and tries to manipulate a marriage between
Harriet and Mr. Elton, a young clergyman, who has set his sight
on Emma. Emma has feelings about Mr. Weston's son. When Harriet
becomes interested in George Knightley, a neighbouring squire
who had been her mentor and friend, Emma examines her own conduct.
She has always regarded Knightley as hers, and finally finds her
destiny in marriage with him. Harriet, who is left to decide for
herself, marries Robert Martin, a young farmer.
For further reading: Memoirs by J.E. Austen-Leigh (1870);
Jane Austen and Her World by Mary Lascelles (1939); Jane Austen
and Her Art by M. Lascalles (1941); Jane Austen by R.W. Chapman
(1948); The Novels of Jane Austen by Robert Liddell (1963); The
Language of Jane Austen by N. Page (1972); The Double Life of
Jane Austen by Jane Hodge (1972); The Critical Heritage, ed. by
B. Southam (1987); Jane Austen by Claudia L. Johnson (1990); Erotic
Faith by Robert M. Polhemus (1990); Jane Austen's Novels by Roger
Gard (1992); The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. by Edward
Copeland, Juliet McMaster (1997); A History of Jane Austen's Family
by George Holbert Tucker (1998); Critical Essays of Jane Austen,
ed. by Laura Mooneyham (1998); Jane Austen by Deirdre Le Faye
(1998); The Author's Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen,
and the Establishment of the Novel by Jo Alyson Parker (1998)
- See also: J.F. Cooper - Museum: Jane Austen's House, Chawton,
Alton, GU34 ISD. - Austen wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion
while living in this house.
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