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Austen, Jane, 1775-1817We have 14 books for this author.
 Jane Austen (16 December 1775–18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Her social commentary and masterful use of both free indirect speech and irony eventually made Austen one of the most influential and honoured novelists in English literature. Her novels were all written and set around the Regency Era. She never married and died at age 41. Life
Jane Austen was born in 1775 at a rectory in Steventon, Hampshire, one of two daughters of the Reverend George Austen (1731–1805) and his wife Cassandra (née Leigh) (1739–1827). Her brothers James and Henry followed in their father's path and joined the Anglican clergy (the latter towards the end of his life after a successful career as a banker), while her brothers Francis and Charles both pursued naval careers. There was also a brother with a disability, George, who did not live with the Austens. Her sister was named Cassandra, like their mother, and Austen tended to follow this naming practice in her novels, with eldest daughters named after their mothers. She was very close to her sister Cassandra throughout her life. The abundant correspondence between them provides historians with the greatest insight into Jane's thoughts. Cassandra destroyed many of the letters after Jane's death, likely upon Jane's request.[citation needed] Cassandra drew the only undisputed life portrait of Jane, a somewhat rudimentary, coloured sketch that currently resides in the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1783, Austen was educated briefly by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton; finally, from 1785–1786, she attended the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire. She began her first novel in 1789. Her family life was conducive to writing; the Austen family often enacted plays, which gave Jane an opportunity to present her stories. They also borrowed novels from the local library, which influenced her writing. She was encouraged to write, especially by her brother Henry, who wrote a little himself. Her stories took as their theme the limited provincial world in which she lived for the first twenty-six years of her life. Jane loved to write her novels in peace and she only shared them with her family when they were performing plays. In 1796, Jane Austen had a flirtation with Tom Lefroy, later Lord High Justice of Ireland, who was a younger relative of a friend of hers. Jane Austen wrote two letters to Cassandra mentioning him. In a letter dated 9 January 1796, she wrote:
On 16 January 1796, there is another mention:
It does not seem to have been a serious relationship and the love affair did not last long. However, it has been suggested that Austen might have had him in mind when she created the character Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. In 1801, following her father's retirement, the family moved to the fashionable spa city of Bath, which provides the setting for many of her novels.[2] However, Jane Austen, like her character Anne Elliot, seemed to have "persisted in a disinclination for Bath." Her dislike may have been influenced by the family's precarious financial situation and from being uprooted from her settled existence in the country. In 1802, Austen received a marriage proposal from a wealthy, but "big and awkward" man named Harris Bigg-Wither, the younger brother of her friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg, and six years her junior.[3] The marriage would have freed her from some of the constraints and dependency she experienced as a spinster. She initially accepted his offer, only to change her mind and refuse him the following day. 
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 his mother and sisters lived. This house is now a museum and is a popular site for tourists and literary pilgrims alike. Austen wrote her later novels there. It wasn't until 1811, six years before her death, that a novel she had written, Sense and Sensibility, was published, and it was at the expense of her brother Henry and his wife Eliza. In 1816, she began to suffer from ill health. In May 1817, she moved to Winchester to be closer to her doctor. Jane's condition worsened, and on 18 July 1817, she died at the age of forty-one and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. It is now thought by some that she may have suffered from Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands that was common in the 19th century due to its being a frequent complication of tuberculosis. The disease was at that time unnamed. Others, such as biographer Carol Shields, have hypothesized that she died from breast cancer. Her last words were: "Nothing, but death," when asked by her sister, Cassandra, if there was anything she wanted. WorksEngland's first truly important female novelist, Jane Austen had difficulty in establishing a reputation for herself, despite the fact that she counted the Prince Regent among her admirers of the time. A novelist of manners, her work dealt with a limited social circle in society—that of the provincial gentry and the upper classes. As she stated in a letter to her niece, Anna: 'Three of four families in a country village are the very thing to work on.' She explored their relationships, values and shortcomings with detachment and irony, and her restrained satire of social excesses of the period was perhaps nearer to the classically minded moralizing of the eighteenth century than to the new age of Romantic rebellion and potential sentimentalism.[4] Austen's best-known work is Pride and Prejudice, which is viewed as an exemplar of her socially astute novel of manners. Austen also wrote a satire of the popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, which was published posthumously in 1818. Adhering to a common contemporary practice for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously; this kept her out of leading literary circles. Austen's novels 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 and the social turbulence of early nineteenth-century England was barely touched upon in novels which concentrated on the everyday life and ostensibly trivial aspects of genteel society—balls, trips, dances, and an unending procession of marriage proposals. Thus, it could be argued she was more neo-classical in outlook. 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 and Lord Byron. Within her limited field, however, she did create a memorable range of characters whose dealings with love, marriage, courtship and social or personal rivalries were treated with a remarkable degree of objectivity and psychological depth. Although Austen did not promote passionate emotion as did other Romantic movement writers, she was also sceptical of its opposite—excessive calculation and practicality often leads to disaster in Austen novels (for example, Maria Bertram's marriage of convenience to the wealthy but dull Mr. Rushworth has an unhappy conclusion). Her close analysis of character displayed both a warm sense of humour and a hardy realism: vanity, selfishness and a lack of self-knowledge are among the faults most severely judged in her novels (e.g. in the case of Wickham and the flighty Lydia in Pride and Prejudice). Literary Influences Among Austen's influences were Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, George Crabbe and Fanny Burney. Austen owed much in particular to both Richardson and Fielding with regard to her concept of the novel. Her first work, Elinor and Marianne, (later modified and published as Sense and Sensibility) was epistolary in technique. Her choice of a third-person omniscient narrator showed the influence of Fielding but, unlike the latter, she did not allow the narrator to intrude so much during the course of the story. Indeed, direct comments on the part of the narrator are rare, Austen preferring to let subtle nuance and dialogue illuminate her attitude to the characters and unfolding events. Verbal and situational irony are frequently combined with superbly structured dialogues to reinforce judgments which would otherwise have to be made explicitly. Criticized for being repetitive, her plots are nonetheless well structured, and reveal a sincere love of perfection and minutiae of detail that she believed was one of the prerogatives of any potential writer.[5] Criticism
Austen's novels received only moderate renown when they were published, though Sir Walter Scott in particular praised her work:
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 told his librarian to give her a guided tour of his London residence Carlton House's library. He also gave "permission" (effectively a command) for Emma to be dedicated to him. 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 treatises 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:
Negative views of Austen have been notable, with severe detractors frequently accusing her writing of being unliterary and middle-brow. Charlotte Brontë criticized the narrow scope of Austen's fiction:
Mark Twain's reaction was also negative:
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 securing advantageous marriages, unliberated and disquieting. During her time, 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 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, honor 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. BibliographyNovels
Shorter works
Juvenilia
FilmographyIn 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
See also List of artistic depictions of and related to Pride and Prejudice. Emma
Sense and Sensibility
Persuasion
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Non-book based
References
Further reading
External linksWorks
Author information
Fan sites and societies
Miscellaneous
This biographical information was gathered from the Jane_Austen page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project. BooksEmma (Audio Book, human-read)Emma Emma (Audio Book, human-read) Lady Susan Love and Freindship Mansfield Park Northanger Abbey Northanger Abbey (Audio Book, human-read) Persuasion Pride and Prejudice (Audio Book, human-read) Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice (Audio Book, human-read) Sense and Sensibility Sense and Sensibility |
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