Jane Austen

Jane Austen! there is a lot  to say. What is so great about her?

Jane Austen is one of the most famous women writers. She is deal with the position of women and their social expectations, most of which are related to marriage. All of her subjects of these stories represent a unique response to those expectations, which is a product of their way of thinking. they did not have much choice when it came to their future. She's great in part because her brilliance might come as a surprise: from the raw biographical details of her life she appears pretty ordinary. We know little else about her life because after her death Cassandra burned most of her letters and censored the rest; her family controlled most of the remaining available information about her and were scrupulous in creating her image as a deeply virtuous, modest woman. Even her epitaph in the north nave of Winchester Cathedral makes no mention of her writing! But I personally have never bought into the Austen family myth of "good quiet Aunt Jane." Based on the surviving letters and accounts, we can see that she was a sharp observer of those in her circle, not above the occasional sarcastic observation about a neighbor's behavior at an assembly, or even a new hat. I think I would have liked her. But this woman of ordinary circumstances and sharply restricted life experiences was a genius, even if, in her own self-effacing words, her canvas was "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work." Those two inches of ivory contain the largest questions of the human drama: Will someone ever love me? Will I find happiness?

Her gifts were an uncanny, sharp, and profound understanding of human nture; a clear, unsentimental perspective; a snarky sense of humor; and a distinctive prose style that delivered the goods with grace and elegance.

This brings us to Jane Austen the writer.

Jane Austen the writer was a brilliant parodist and satirist almost from  the moment she first picked up a pen. But her genius ran to original  stories as well, and she completed the first drafts of both Elinor and Marianne (the original title of Sense and Sensibility) and First Impressions (the original title of Pride and Prejudice) by the time she was 21 years old. She revised and revised and polished until each was a jewel. 

Wikipedia says,

“Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive  reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's  A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become  widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half  of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the  emergence of a Janeite fan culture.”

There is no question that she represents a kind of bridge between the novelists she read and enjoyed (Fanny Burney, Samuel Richardson, Anne Radcliffe) and later 19th century novelists who are still widely read today (Charles Dickens, Henry James, George Eliot). But her plots are narrower in scope and more concerned directly with family relationships, largely marriage, for the women she wrote about had few other options to make their way in life. What would she have made of Isabel Archer?! I would kill to read Austen's take on her. Because I can't imagine Austen allowing Isabel to marry Gilbert Osmond. But I digress. Austen is also much funnier, deliberately comic, in a way those later realists were either incapable of, or deliberately avoided (my vote: incapable). She knew how limiting her female characters' (and her own) circumstances were, and she could not help knowingly mocking them (the circumstances, mostly; the characters, occasionally). Only a woman with a larger perspective, but trapped in a restrictive world, could have written the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, one of the most famous sentences in all of literature. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Although many 21st century Americans undoubtedly consider her a "women's novelist," whatever that means, or the inventor of "chick lit" (God help us), throughout the 200+ years her books have been published she has had many distinguished male acolytes and admirers, including Sir Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling, and ... Dr. Cornel West, who describes himself as a "Jane Austen freak."

This brings us to Jane Austen, the oeuvre.

Six canonical narrative novels completed during her lifetime. One epistolary novel, believed to have been completed when she was still in her teens, though it was not published until more than 50 years after Austen died. Two brilliant and compelling novel fragments. Each great in its own way. Let's begin with Austen's "darling child," Pride and Prejudice, which will celebrate the bicentennial of its publication in 2013. P&P is in my view the most accessible and perhaps the snarkiest of Austen's books. It contains the largest variety of superbly vivid characters and requires serious, even painful character development from its hero and heroine before they can earn their happiness. It has been adapted for the large and small screens a dozen or more times, and several times for the stage, at least once as a musical. The iconic BBC / A&E networks' 6-hour adaptation, first aired in 1995 starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, is still one of the most successful and popular adaptations ever aired on British television. Emma and Persuasion, slightly less famous, are equally great reads, for different reasons. They share in her clever, biting observations of the foibles of personality, and both Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot must experience the pain of loss (or in Emma's case the fear of loss) before they can earn their own happy endings. However, neither of these heroes goes through anything like the painful character development endured by Fitzwilliam Darcy in P&P.

Sense and Sensibility is a different kind of story, but equally acute in its sharp and witty observations of human nature, and Austen's masterful control of her story and characters. If you don't believe me, just read the amazing little jewel that is Chapter 2, and watch the way Austen tells us everything we need to know about both John and Fanny Dashwood, almost entirely in their own words, with just about no omniscient narration.

You can find it here: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/e...

Mansfield Park is more problematical, because the heroine of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, is such an annoying little goody-two-shoes. But Mansfield Park also contains one of the most thoroughly and slyly observed parasites ever recorded in English literature, in the hugely unlikeable Aunt Norris, and a variety of other characters who stretch a few boundaries, including the thoroughly modern Mary Crawford, who has been called "the sexiest woman in Austen" by author William Deresiewicz. Northanger Abbey, the most overtly humorous of all of Austen's narrative novels, has the youngest, silliest, most credulous heroine (17 year old Catherine Morland), and is to my recollection the only one of the six novels in which Austen breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader in the first person. Northanger Abbey is also the novel in which Austen presents her eloquent defense of the very form in which she works. 

...if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding--joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens--there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader--I seldom look into novels--Do not imagine that I often read novels--It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

Northanger Abbey contains a full cast of eccentric and sharply observed characters, many of whom are not at all what they would like us to believe they are, and Austen lets us find out slowly, through Catherine's eyes, instead of spelling it all out for us. In NA Austen also presents us with another thoroughly modern character, the jovial metrosexual Henry Tilney.The epistolary novel, Lady Susan, is in some ways even more remarkable than the narrative novels. Lady Susan Vernon is a cynical sexual predator of the first order, who eventually marries her own daughter's suitor because she believes her daughter is undeserving. The letters are rich with unwritten detail as Austen satirizes the social and marital ambitions of her protagonist. Austen wrote Lady Susan before her 20th birthday. The fragments, well, they fill me with sadness and frustration. Because, dammit, I want to know what Jane was going to do with heroines Emma Watson (The Watsons) and Charlotte Heywood (Sanditon). Completions of both books by other writers exist. But it's not the same.

source: https://www.quora.com