184- ] English Literature
Jane Austen
Austen’s
novels: an overview
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
and unregarded 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 attempts at matchmaking among her
friends and neighbours. After a series of humiliating errors, a chastened Emma
finds her destiny in marriage to the mature and protective George Knightley, a
neighbouring squire who had been her mentor and friend.
Persuasion
tells the story of a second chance, the reawakening of love between Anne Elliot
and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whom seven years earlier she had been
persuaded not to marry. Now Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars with
prize money and the social acceptability of naval rank. He is an eligible
suitor acceptable to Anne’s snobbish father and his circle, and Anne discovers
the continuing strength of her love for him.
Genre
and style
Austen's
works implicitly critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th
century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. The
earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were
followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott,
Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style
and genre Austen repudiated, returning the novel on a "slender
thread" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a "realistic
study of manners".] In the mid-20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis
and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and Fielding; both
believe that she used their tradition of "irony, realism and satire to form
an author superior to both".
Walter
Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of
modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of
watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her relationship with
these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Similar to
William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the
"Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen distances herself
from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar
to his, and she shows "that rhetorically less is artistically more."
She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine
typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels
between 1784 and 1818 contain the word "abbey" in their title). Yet
in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine,
anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or
parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of
elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's
"novel-fueled" desires.] Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic
fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine
is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated manners
and the strict rules of the ballroom. In Sense and Sensibility Austen presents
characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according
to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental
fiction, "Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the
calculating world ... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress."
Richardson's
Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with
a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to
choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. Austen attempted
Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more
conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture
carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect
speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which
she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader
and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary
discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters.
Austen
had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles:
"Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing
and thoughts of their characters." Techniques such as fragmentary speech
suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and phrasing rather
than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social variants. Dialogue reveals
a character's mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each treated differently and
often through varying patterns of sentence structures. When Elizabeth Bennet
rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals
that he has wounded her:
From
the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance
with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance,
your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as
to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have
built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt
that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to
marry.
Austen's
plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to secure social
standing and economic security. As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked
the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were
treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what
mattered in life". Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her
characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic
John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own
attitude that comedy "is the saving grace of life". Part of Austen's
fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first
woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in
that she follows his advice to write "a representation of life as may
excite mirth".
Her
humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most
successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities
of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used
comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and gender relations, and
she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with
"ethical sensibility", creating artistic tension. Critic Robert
Polhemus writes, "To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we
need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule ...
and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling
contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical
bias with her sense of the good."
Austen’s
accomplishments and legacy
Although
the birth of the English novel is to be seen in the first half of the 18th
century primarily in the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry
Fielding, it is with Jane Austen that the novel takes on its distinctively
modern character in the realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the
unremarkable situations of everyday life. In her six major novels—Sense and
Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and
Persuasion—Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the
England of her time, revealing the possibilities of “domestic” literature. Her
repeated fable of a young woman’s voyage to self-discovery on the passage
through love to marriage focuses upon easily recognizable aspects of life. It
is this concentration upon character and personality and upon the tensions
between her heroines and their society that relates her novels more closely to
the modern world than to the traditions of the 18th century. It is this
modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style,
her shrewd, amused sympathy, and the satisfaction to be found in stories so
skillfully told, in novels so beautifully constructed, that helps to explain
her continuing appeal for readers of all kinds. Modern critics remain
fascinated by the commanding structure and organization of the novels, by the
triumphs of technique that enable the writer to lay bare the tragicomedy of
existence in stories of which the events and settings are apparently so
ordinary and so circumscribed.
The
enduring popularity of Austen’s books can be seen in the numerous film and
television adaptions of her work. These include Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility
(1995), which starred Emma Thompson (who also wrote the Academy Award-winning
screenplay) and Kate Winslet. Pride and Prejudice was notably adapted into a
1940 movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and a 1995 TV miniseries
with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. Other film adaptations of Pride and
Prejudice include Bride & Prejudice (2004), directed by Gurinder Chadha and
starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan; a 2005 film featuring Keira Knightley and
Matthew Macfadyen; and Fire Island (2022), starring Joel Kim Booster. Mansfield
Park was covered in a 1983 miniseries, a 1999 film, and a 2007 TV movie.
Treatments of Emma include a 1996 TV movie, a 1996 film starring Gwyneth
Paltrow, and a 2020 movie. In addition, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) was based
on Pride and Prejudice, and Clueless (1995) was inspired by Emma.
Reception
Contemporaneous
responses
As
Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal
renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed.
Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial
and cautious, most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.
Sir
Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, anonymously wrote a review of Emma
in 1815, using it to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel and
praising Austen's realism, "the art of copying from nature as she really
exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of
the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking
representation of that which is daily taking place around him". The other
important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However,
Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons
between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and
praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone
for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.
19th
century
Because
Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that
"powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and
colour in the writing", some 19th-century critics preferred the works of
Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Notwithstanding Walter Scott's positivity,
Austen's work did not win over those who preferred the prevailing aesthetic values
of the elite Romantic zeitgeist. Her novels were republished in Britain from
the 1830s and sold steadily. Austen's six books were included in the
canon-making Standard Novels series by publisher Richard Bentley, which
increased their stature. That series referred to her as "the founder of a
school of novelists" and called her a genius.
The
first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles in an 1842
essay, dismissing her in two sentences as a boring, imitative writer with no
substance. Austen was not widely appreciated in France until 1878, when the
French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le Roman Classique en
Angleterre, in which he called Austen a "genius", the first French
author to do so. The first accurate translation of Austen into French occurred
in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger Abbey as Catherine Morland.
In
Britain and North America, Austen gradually grew in the estimation of both the
public and the literati. In the United States, Austen was being recommended as
reading in schools as early as 1838, according to Professor Devoney Looser.
Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes published a series of
enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. Later in the century, novelist
Henry James referred to Austen several times with approval, and on one occasion
ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the
fine painters of life".
The
publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869
introduced Austen's life story to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane",
the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred another reissue
of Austen's novels. Editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated
editions and collectors' sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie
Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the
1880s as "Austenolatry". Around the start of the 20th century, an
intellectual clique of Janeites reacted against the popularisation of Austen,
distinguishing their deeper appreciation from the vulgar enthusiasm of the
masses.
In
response, Henry James decried "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a
rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and
interest".] The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the
"anti-Janites" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprised a formidable
literary squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, D. H. Lawrence and
Kingsley Amis, but in "every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the
special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen
relatively untouched".
Modern
Austen's
works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was
published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University.[169]
Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean
scholar A. C. Bradley, who grouped Austen's novels into "early" and
"late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first
academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate
Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take
Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie
et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of
Austen in France. In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition
of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any
English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published
editions of Austen's works.
With
the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art, the
academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles analyzed the books Austen read
and their influence on her work, and closely examined Austen's style and
"narrative art". Concern arose that academics were obscuring the
appreciation of Austen with increasingly esoteric theories, a debate that has
continued since.
The
period since World War II has seen a diversity of critical approaches to
Austen, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially,
postcolonial theory. The divide has widened between the popular appreciation of
Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and academic judgements .In 1994,
literary critic Harold Bloom placed Austen among the greatest Western writers
of all time.
In
the People's Republic of China after 1949, writings of Austen were regarded as
too frivolous, and thus during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–69,
Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois imperialist". In the late
1970s, when Austen's works was re-published in China, her popularity with
readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people
generally read books for enjoyment, not political edification.
In
a typical modern debate, the conservative American professor Gene Koppel, to
the indignation of his liberal literature students, mentioned that Austen and
her family were "Tories of the deepest dye", i.e. Conservatives in
opposition to the liberal Whigs. Although several feminist authors such as
Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock claimed Austen for their own cause, Koppel
argued that different people react to a work of literature in different
subjective ways, as explained by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus
competing interpretations of Austen's work can be equally valid, provided they
are grounded in textual and historical analysis: it is equally possible to see
Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency-era society and as a conservative
upholding its values
Adaptations
Austen's
novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type,
from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family
members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were
over 100 printed adaptations. The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was
published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of
Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance, and Filippi was
also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, The Bennets
(1901). The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of Pride and
Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television
dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's
plots, characterisations and settings. The British critic Robert Irvine noted
that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940
version of Pride and Prejudice, class is subtly downplayed, and the society of
Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon
the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that
Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.
From
1995, many Austen adaptations appeared, with Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility,
for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the
BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer
Ehle and Colin Firth. A 2005 British production of Pride and Prejudice,
directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was
followed in 2007 by ITV's Mansfield Park , Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and in 2016 by Love & Friendship starring
Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan, a film version of Lady Susan, that borrowed the
title of Austen's Love and Freindship [sic].
List of works
Novels
Sense and Sensibility (1811) , Pride and Prejudice
(1813) , Mansfield Park (1814) , Emma (1816) , Northanger Abbey (1818,
posthumous) , Persuasion (1818, posthumous) , Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)
Unfinished fiction
The Watsons (1804) , Sanditon (1817)
Other works
Sir Charles Grandison (adapted play) (1793, 1800) , Plan
of a Novel (1815) , Poems (1796–1817) , Prayers (1796–1817) , Letters
(1796–1817) , Juvenilia—Volume the First (1787–1793) , Frederic & Elfrida ,
Jack & Alice , Edgar & Emma , Henry and Eliza, The Adventures of Mr.
Harley , Sir William Mountague , Memoirs of Mr. Clifford , The Beautifull
Cassandra [sic] , Amelia Webster , The Visit , The Mystery, The Three Sisters , A Fragment ,
A beautiful description , The generous Curate , Ode
to Pity , Juvenilia—Volume the Second (1787–1793) , Love and Freindship [sic] ,
Lesley Castle
The History of England , A Collection of Letters , The
female philosopher , The first Act of a Comedy , A Letter from a Young Lady , A
Tour through Wales , A Tale m Juvenilia—Volume the Third (1787–1793) , Evelyn ,
Catharine, or The Bower