Jane Austen | Biography, Books, Movies

Jane Austen Biography

With the publishing of Sense & Sensibility (1811), Pride & Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), & Emma (1815), Jane Austen enjoyed small popularity but little notoriety during her lifetime. In addition to Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, which were both accepted for publication posthumously in 1818, she also started Sanditon but passed away before it could be completed. Along with the brief epistolary novel Lady Susan and the incomplete novel The Watsons, she also left behind three volumes of manuscripts of youthful writings.

After her death, Austen’s renown considerably increased, and her six complete novels are rarely out of print. When her writings were reissued in Richard Bentley’s Basic Novels series, designed by Ferdinand Pickering, & sold as a set in 1833, her posthumous reputation underwent a significant transformation.

Family

On December 16, 1775, at Steventon, Hampshire, Jane Austen was born. Her father said in a letter saying her mother “definitely supposed to have been carried to bed a month ago” because she arrived a couple of weeks later than their parents had anticipated. The new baby represented “a present toy for Cassy & a future companion,” he continued. She was not baptized with the sole name Jane till 5 April just at a local church due to the especially hard winter of 1776.

The Rector of the Steventon and Deane Anglican parishes was George Austen (1731–1805). He hailed from a large, affluent family of wool traders. As the eldest boys in each generation got inheritances, the wealth was divided, and George’s family branch sank into poverty. He & his two siblings were orphaned as kids and were raised by relatives. In 1745, Philadelphia Austen, George Austen’s 15-year-old sister, began working as an apprentice milliner in Covent Garden.

At the age of sixteen, George enrolled in St. John’s College in Oxford, where he most likely first encountered Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827). She hailed from a renowned Leigh family and her father served as the rector of All Souls College in Oxford, where she grew up amidst the aristocracy. Her eldest brother James received vast land and money from his great-aunt Perrot in exchange for changing his name to Leigh-Perrot.

They were presumably engaged when George Austen & Cassandra Leigh traded miniatures. The wealthy spouse of his affluent second cousin Thomas Knight had given him the living of Steventon Parish. Two months ever since Cassandra’s father passed away, on April 26, 1764, at St. Swithin’s Church in Bath, they were legally wed in a small ceremony. Their income was limited thanks to George’s meager annual pay, and Cassandra entered the marriage with the hope of receiving a little legacy upon her mother’s passing.

While Steventon, a 16th-century mansion in ruin, underwent urgent renovations, the Austens relocated to the nearby Deane rectory. During her time at Deane, Cassandra gave birth to three children: James in 1765, George in 1766, & Edward in 1767.

Education

In 1783, Mrs. Ann Cawley moved Austen and Cassandra to Oxford for their education. Later that year, when she relocated to Southampton, she brought them with her. After developing typhus in the autumn, both girls were brought home, and Austen almost passed away. Before starting boarding school at Reading alongside her sister in mid-1785, Austen was homeschooled. Mrs. La Tournelle, who had a cork leg and a love of theatre, oversaw the early literacy Abbey Girls’ School.

French, spelling, needlework, dancing, music, and maybe theatre were likely part of the curriculum. The Austen family was unable to pay the sisters’ school tuition, so they left before December 1786.In the years following 1786, Austen “never again resided anywhere outside the confines of her intimate familial surroundings.”

Through reading, her father and siblings James & Henry helped her complete the remaining of her schooling. Austen “read some of the same school literature as the lads” her father tutored, according to Irene Collins. Austen seems to have easy accessibility to Warren Hastings’ collection as well as her father’s library. These collections came together to create a sizable, varied library. Additionally, her father was understanding of Austen’s occasionally risqué literary experiments and gave both of her sister’s expensive paper as well as other writing supplies.

The private theater played a crucial role in Jane Austen’s upbringing. In the rectory barn throughout her childhood, the family and friends performed several plays, including David Garrick’s Bon Ton and Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775). She most certainly took part in these events first as a casual viewer and then as a participant, as James Austen, her eldest brother, wrote the prologues and epilogues.

The fact that comedies made up the preponderance of the plays show how Austen’s capacity for satire evolved. She started writing works at the age of 12 years old, and even during her teens, she produced three short plays. Her practice was to nurse and raise a baby for 12 to 18 months at Elizabeth Littlewood’s house, a neighbor, after keeping it at home for a few months.

Genre and Writing Style

The transition from the sentimental novels of the latter half of the 18th century to 19th-century literary realism is marked in part by Austen’s works. Richardson, Henry Fielding, & Tobias Smollett, the first English novelists, were followed by the sentimentalist and romantic school, which Austen denied, restoring the novel on such a “slender thread” to Richardson & Fielding’s culture of a “realistic study of manners.” Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, & Oliver Goldsmith were among them.

In the middle of the 20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis & Ian Watt grouped her with Richardson and Fielding; they both thought she combined their heritage of “irony, reality, with satire to form a writer superior to both.” She stayed away from popular Gothic literature, which frequently featured a heroine marooned in a far-off setting, such as a castle or an abbey.

She does, however, refer to a Northanger Abbey stereotype where the protagonist, Catherine, anticipates relocating to a rural area. Austen changes the genre rather than openly rejecting or mocking it by contrasting reality — descriptions of exquisite rooms and contemporary conveniences — with the heroine’s “novel-fueled” ambitions. The heroine has still been confined, but her confinement is ordinary and real — regulated manners and the stringent norms of the ballroom — instead of the Gothic fiction she doesn’t entirely reject.

Despite being a parody of popular emotional fiction, reviewer Keymer claims that Marianne in Sense and Sensibility “responds to the calculating reality… with a fairly legitimate cry of female sorrow.” Austen’s stories highlight how women have always relied on marriage for their social and financial stability. The novel of the eighteenth century lacked the gravitas of its nineteenth-century predecessors when books were seen as “the natural venue for discussion & ventilation of what counted in life.”