Shweta Kataria Essays (1970 words) - Literature, Jane Austen

Shweta Kataria Ms. Naomi British Literature: 19th Century 3 rd April 2017 JANE AUSTEN Jane Austen ( born on December 16, 1775, Steventon, Hampshire , England died July 18, 1817, Winchester , Hampshire), English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. She published four novels during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility , Pride and Prejudice , Mansfield Park , and Emma . In these and in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey , she vividly depicted English middle-class life during the early 19th century. Her novels defined the era's novel of manners . Jane Austen was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon, where her father, the Reverend George Austen, was rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eightsix boys and two girls. Her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister, Cassandra. Their father was a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. His wife was a woman of ready wit, famed for her impromptu verses and stories. The great family amusement was acting. Jane Austen's lively and affectionate family circle provided a stimulating context for her writing. Moreover, her experience was carried far beyond Steventon rectory by an extensive network of relationships by blood and friendship. It was this worldof the minor landed gentry and the country clergy, in the village, the neighborhood, and the country town, with occasional visits to Bath and to Londonthat she was to use in the settings, characters, and subject matter of her novels. Jane Austen's three early novels form a distinct group in which a strong element of literary satire accompanies the comic depiction of character and society. Sense and Sensibility tells the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters. Marianne is the heroine of "sensibility"i.e., of openness and enthusiasm. She becomes infatuated with the attractive John Willoughby, who seems to be a romantic lover but is in reality an unscrupulous fortune hunter. He deserts her for an heiress, leaving her to learn a dose of "sense" in a wholly unromantic marriage with a staid and settled bachelor, Colonel Brandon, who is 20 years her senior. By contrast, Marianne's older sister, Elinor, is the guiding light of "sense," or prudence and discretion, whose constancy toward her lover, Edward Ferrars, is rewarded by her marriage to him after some distressing vicissitudes. Pride and Prejudice describes the clash between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy , a rich and aristocratic landowner. Although Austen shows them intrigued by each other, she reverses the convention of "first impressions": "pride" of rank and fortune and "prejudice" against the inferiority of the Bennet family hold Darcy aloof, while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the "pride" of self-respect and by "prejudice" against Darcy's snobbery. Ultimately, they come together in love and self-understanding. The intelligent and high-spirited Elizabeth was Jane Austen's own favourite among all her heroines and is one of the most engaging in English literature. Northanger Abbey combines a satire on conventional novels of polite society with one on Gothic tales of terror. Catherine Morland, the unspoiled daughter of a country parson, is the innocent abroad who gains worldly wisdom, first in the fashionable society of Bath and then at Northanger Abbey itself, where she learns not to interpret the world through her reading of Gothic thrillers. Her mentor and guide is the self-assured and gently ironic Henry Tilney, her husband-to-be. In the three novels of Jane Austen's maturity, the literary satire, though still present, is more subdued and is subordinated to the comedy of character and society. In its tone and discussion of religion and religious duty, Mansfield Park is the most serious of Austen's novels. The heroine, Fanny Price, is a self-effacing cousin cared for by the Bertram family in their country house. Fanny emerges as a true heroine whose moral strength eventually wins her complete acceptance in the Bertram family and marriage to Edmund Bertram himself, after that family's disastrous involvement with the meretricious and loose-living Crawfords. Of all Austen's novels, Emma is the most consistently comic in tone. It centres on Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman who indulges herself with meddlesome and unsuccessful