Jane Austen 1775-1817

Jane Austen stands on the conservative side of this battle of ideas, though
in novels that incorporate their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly
into love stories that many readers are unaware of them. She admires Johnsons
prose, Crabbe and Cowper.
Three of her novels Sense and Sensibility (first published in 1811;
originally titled Elinor and Marianne), Pride and Prejudice (1813; originally
First Impressions), and Northanger Abbey (published posthumously in 1817)
were drafted in the late 1790s. Three more novels Mansfield Park (1814),
Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817, together with Northanger Abbey) were
written between 1811 and 1817.
Austen uses, essentially, two standard plots. In one of these a rightminded but neglected heroine is gradually acknowledged to be correct by
characters who have previously looked down on her (such as Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park and Anne Elliot in Persuasion). In the other an attractive but
self-deceived heroine (such as Emma Woodhouse in Emma or Elizabeth Bennet
in Pride and Prejudice) belatedly recovers from her condition of error and is
rewarded with the partner she had previously despised or overlooked. On this
slight framework, Austen constructs a powerful case for the superiority of the
Augustan virtues of common sense, empiricism, and rationality to the new
Romantic values of imagination, egotism, and subjectivity. With Austen the
comic brilliance and exquisite narrative construction of Fielding return to the
English novel, in conjunction with a distinctive and deadly irony.
- though unmarried herself, she dwells on the politics of marriage
- little political commitment; exploration of a gentry class untouched by the
fever of the Napoleonic wars, only faintly echoed by the naval officers in
Mansfield

Park

and

Persuasion.

Similarly,

the

transformations

industrialisation and the imperial expansion are hardly alluded to

of

- concern with upper-middle class, presented as secure in its values, privileges,

snobberies; a society defined by land, money, class, with rank as the
fundamental stamp of identity
- no awareness of geographical space; images of far-flung estates and their
incomes and of the fashionable society in London or Bath; nature, with images
of the seaside or parkland, is only the background of picnics
- subtle, challenging, inventive social humour
- her writing is informed by the mindscape of the time Christianly
conservative; Wordsworth praises her for offering an admirable copy of life.
- the late 18th century cult of sensibility and sentiment and the Romantic
cultivation of passion countered by an ironic exposure of affectation and an
affirmation of the virtues of restraint
- 3 or 4 families in a country village are considered ideal for a novel the
focus is enhanced by the deliberate omissions
- moral message the merits of good conduct/manners, sound reason, with
marriage as a social institution
- never scorns love, but balances its disruptive nature, advocating selfknowledge/discipline/practicality
- the heroines are intelligent and witty (Elizabeth Bennet), egotistic, independent
(Emma Woodhouse), introspective (Elinor Dashwood) or passive, self-effacing
(Fanny Price) all brought to mature judgement and emotional fulfilment
- Sense and Sensibility, 1811 balances maturity against impulsiveness,
undermines the attraction of superficial glamour, contrasts conflicting value
systems and ways of seeing
- Northanger Abbey, 1818, Pride and Prejudice, 1813 first impressions,
illusions, subjective opinions or prejudices resolved through the learning of
detachment, balance, reasonableness and humiliating reassessment
- not in favour of mere cleverness, wit, spontaneity, without the balance of a
steadier moral assurance a pattern of education
- Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815/6), and Persuasion (1817/8) moral
processes of disciplined learning, weighing, judging and ultimate understanding;
calculatedly amusing

- restricted world, where the social and physical confines of the setting impose
limits of opinion hence the fools, snobs, bores, gossips, prudes, poseurs
- illusions of actuality, of a society confident in tis codes of values
- Emma the heroines wayward explanations of manipulations,
misapprehensions, niceties, complacencies, lapses in judgements finds
personal liberation in the respect for rules
- anti-Romanticism in Mansfield Park a heroine suffering from the faults of
ignorance and timidity; her Christian forbearance informs her grasp of tact and
decorum
- sombre tone in Persuasion process of learning and judging; Anne Eliot as
astute literary critic (the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by
those who enjoyed it completely); the most discriminating character, whose
intelligence balances the merits of conflicting opinions, ideas, impressions,
feelings in a world seen as shallow, petty, vain
- freedom of action and moral decision are worked out not amidst a deceptively
gracious society, but in a post-lapsarian world in need of grace itself