Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)
Steventon, Hampshire, England

Jane Austen was born to a clergyman and she spent the first 25 years of her life in Steventon, Hampshire. As a child, she wrote fiction and composed early versions of her first three novels (Elinor and Marianne, Sense and Sensibility, and First Impressions). In 1801, her family moved to Bath upon the retiring of her father, then they moved to Chawton where Jane spent the rest of her days. In 1811, Sense and Sensibility was published followed by Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. A final novel, Sanditon, was unfinished upon her death in 1817. Jane Austen never married and lived a relatively restricted life. However, the atmosphere of family, village life, and of England's rural gentry did not limit her. Austen's works are satirical comedies of the domestic and social life of a limited sphere of English society. Her plots constitute variations on the standard theme of female novelists of the late 18th century, definitively established by Fanny Burney: a young girl's entry into society climaxed eventually by marriage. Each of Austen's heroines follows this course, by the end of the novel acquiring a husband, often an older man who has been both father and guide to her as well as lover. Well aware of the limitations of her fiction, Austen likened herself to a painter of miniatures; yet within the confines of her seemingly predictable plots, and narrow focus, she carefully explores, in highly polished, witty, and meticulous style, an important and universal theme, the adjustments the self must make to family and society.

Austen's early novels look back to the 18th century. Northanger Abbey satirizes the Gothic novel and sentimental friendship, and Sense and Sensibility mocks the cult of sensibility in which personal feeling and spontaneity were valued to the exclusion of social responsibility and self-restraint. Pride and Prejudice, representing the flowering of her early style, is probably Austen's best-loved work; its vivacious and witty heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, is in the tradition of the articulate women of Restoration and 18th-century comedy. Austen's later works, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, have themes traditionally labeled Victorian; they describe the loneliness and repression of young women forced into silence and self-effacement by the social codes prescribing female behavior. Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, for example, must hide their love and wait for their moral strength to be discovered. Emma, the sunniest and most satisfying of Austen's novels, has something of the sprightliness of Pride and Prejudice but also displays the psychological probing found in the later novels. It is especially skillful in the use of dialogue to convey the mental shifts and starts of its characters.

Criticism:

In her own time, Austen was a retiring novelist whose name did not appear on her title pages. Yet although she was not widely known or acclaimed, she had a select band of admirers that included the novelist Sir Walter Scott. Her influence on later writers such as Henry James was profound. There is, however, considerable debate about the tone of her work. Some critics have stressed the irony of her vision. They see Austen as responding subversively to a world she knows to be debased, undermining social values while she pays conventional homage to them. Others view her work as an intelligent affirmation of conservative social and religious values. According to proponents of this view, her invariably happy endings are not acts of bad faith but necessary culminations of a mature fictional vision. Jane Austen, one of the greatest of British fiction writers, had a major impact on the development of the English novel. Her six novels, written during the romantic period, combine 18th- and 19th-century concerns and modes of fiction and together have a thematic unity and a consistent excellence that make them one of the supreme achievements of English literature.

Works:
Sense & Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Emma (1816)
Northanger Abbey (1818)
Persuasion

Additional Information:
Works and Life of Jane Austen - < http://www.pemberley.com/ >

Sources:

Jane Austen Society of North America. 2001 < http://www.jasna.org/ >
"Austen, Jane" The Columbia Encyclopedia. Sixth Edition. Feb 2001. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.< http://www.bartleby.com/65/sh/ShelleyP.html >