Jane Austen

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose six completed novels are among the most admired and most loved in the English language. She wrote about a small world, the families of the country gentry and clergy in southern England, but she studied it so closely and so wittily that readers across the world recognize themselves in her characters.

She lived from 1775 to 1817, a period that included the French Revolution and the long wars between Britain and France. Two of her brothers were officers in the Royal Navy during those wars. Her novels rarely mention big public events directly, but money, war, inheritance laws and the limits placed on women shape the lives of her characters.

Austen published anonymously. Her first novel appeared as “By a Lady”, and later ones as “By the Author of Sense and Sensibility” and so on. Only after her death did her brother Henry reveal her name to the public.

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at the rectory of Steventon, a village in Hampshire. She was the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife Cassandra (born Leigh). Her father was the local clergyman and also took in boys as pupils, so the house was crowded and full of books.

Jane and her elder sister Cassandra were sent away to school for short periods, including a boarding school in Reading, but most of Jane’s education came from her father’s library and from family life. The Austens loved reading novels aloud and putting on plays in the barn.

From about the age of eleven or twelve, Jane wrote comic stories, playlets and parodies of the popular novels of the day. She later copied them into three notebooks, now known as her Juvenilia. These early pieces are wild, absurd and very funny, and they show that she was already mocking the clichés of sentimental fiction.

Sense and Sensibility (1811) follows two sisters, the careful Elinor and the passionate Marianne, after their family loses its home. Pride and Prejudice (1813) tells how the lively Elizabeth Bennet and the proud Mr Darcy misjudge each other and slowly learn better. Its first sentence, about a single man in possession of a good fortune being in want of a wife, is one of the most famous openings in English literature.

Mansfield Park (1814) is the story of Fanny Price, a poor, quiet girl raised by rich relatives, who holds on to her principles when others do not. Emma (1815) is about a clever, confident young woman who likes to arrange other people’s lives and makes a series of comic mistakes.

Northanger Abbey, published after Austen’s death, gently mocks the fashion for spooky “Gothic” novels through a heroine who imagines mysteries everywhere. Persuasion, also published after her death, follows Anne Elliot, who was persuaded years before to give up the man she loved, and gets a second chance.

Each novel ends in marriage, but the stories are really about learning: learning to judge people fairly, to see through flattery and to understand one’s own heart.

Austen wrote early versions of three of her novels in her twenties at Steventon. “Elinor and Marianne” (later Sense and Sensibility) was drafted before 1796; “First Impressions” (later Pride and Prejudice) was written in 1796–1797, and her father offered it to the London publisher Thomas Cadell, who declined it without reading it. “Susan” (later Northanger Abbey) was sold to the publisher Crosby in 1803 for £10, but Crosby never printed it; the Austens bought it back in 1816.

In 1801 her father retired and moved the family to Bath. The following years were unsettled. In December 1802 Jane accepted a marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, a wealthy family friend, but withdrew her acceptance the next morning. Her father died in January 1805, leaving his widow and daughters dependent on the brothers. They moved to Southampton and then, in July 1809, to a cottage at Chawton in Hampshire, provided by her brother Edward, who had been adopted by rich relatives and owned the Chawton estate.

At Chawton Austen found stability and wrote steadily. Sense and Sensibility was published by Thomas Egerton in October 1811 “on commission”, meaning that the author bore the risk; it made her a profit of about £140. She sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice to Egerton for £110, and it appeared in January 1813. Mansfield Park followed in May 1814 and Emma, published by John Murray, in December 1815. At the suggestion of the Prince Regent’s librarian, Emma was dedicated to the Prince Regent, who admired her novels.

In early 1816 Austen began to fall ill. She finished Persuasion that summer, and in early 1817 began a new novel, later called Sanditon, but stopped after about twelve chapters. In May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor, and died there on 18 July 1817. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral; the original inscription on her grave praised her character but did not mention her writing.

Austen’s world is the English gentry: landowners, clergy, naval officers and professionals, together with their families. Within this world, rank and income were carefully measured. Characters are often introduced with their annual income, such as Mr Darcy’s famous “ten thousand a year”, because readers of the time understood exactly what these sums meant for a household’s way of life.

The law of inheritance mattered greatly. Estates were often “entailed”, passing to the nearest male heir, so that daughters could be left with little. This is the problem facing the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice and the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility. Genteel women could rarely earn a living except as governesses, and marriage was often the only route to economic security, a fact Austen treats with both comedy and seriousness.

Austen herself remained unmarried and depended financially on her family. Her writing earned her a modest but real income, roughly a few hundred pounds over her lifetime, which gave her a small measure of independence.

The wider world enters her novels in quieter ways. The navy, in which her brothers Francis and Charles served (both later became admirals), is central to Persuasion. In Mansfield Park the family fortune depends on an estate in Antigua, in the Caribbean, which in that period would have been worked by enslaved people, and Fanny Price asks her uncle about the slave trade, a question met by silence.

Austen is famous for irony: saying one thing in a way that lets the reader see another. Her narrators often seem to agree politely with a character’s view while quietly showing how foolish it is. This makes her novels funny, but also morally sharp, because the reader is constantly invited to judge.

She was also a master of dialogue. Characters reveal themselves through the way they talk: the endless chatter of Miss Bates in Emma, the pompous speeches of Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, the sharp exchanges between Elizabeth and Darcy. Many scenes read almost like plays, which helps explain why her novels adapt so well to stage and screen.

Most importantly for the history of the novel, Austen developed free indirect style (or free indirect discourse). The narrator’s voice slips into a character’s thoughts without saying “she thought”, so that we see the world through the character’s eyes while still hearing the narrator’s judgment. This technique allowed her to show a mind in the process of misjudging and then correcting itself, as Emma Woodhouse does. Later novelists from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf built on this method.

Austen described her own art modestly. In a letter she compared her work to a little piece of ivory, two inches wide, on which she worked with a very fine brush. Critics have long debated whether this image reflects real modesty, ironic self-defence, or a precise statement of her method of small scale and high finish.

Austen’s novels were well reviewed in her lifetime but she was not widely famous. In 1816 Walter Scott praised Emma in the Quarterly Review, admiring her art of copying nature as it really exists in the common walks of life. After her death, her brother Henry’s “Biographical Notice”, printed with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, first named her to the public.

Her reputation grew slowly. In 1833 the publisher Richard Bentley reissued her novels, which have remained in print ever since. Some Victorian writers were unimpressed: Charlotte Brontë found her work too cool and restrained. The turning point for popular fame was A Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published in 1869 (dated 1870), which presented her as a gentle, domestic “dear Aunt Jane”. Devoted admirers came to be called “Janeites”.

In the twentieth century Austen became a central author in university English studies and in popular culture. Film and television adaptations, especially from the 1990s onward, brought her stories to new audiences, and modern retellings have set them in places from Los Angeles high schools to Indian and Pakistani families. Her novels have been translated into dozens of languages, including Korean, Japanese and Chinese, where Pride and Prejudice is among the most widely read English novels.

When Austen began writing, the novel was still a young and somewhat disreputable form in England. Readers loved the long letter-novels of Samuel Richardson, the comic panoramas of Henry Fielding, the social comedies of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and the thrilling Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe. Many moralists warned that novels were a waste of time, especially for young women. In a famous passage of Northanger Abbey, Austen’s narrator defends the novel as a work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed.

Austen learned from all these writers but narrowed her focus. She gave up the melodrama, coincidences and long digressions common in the fiction of her time and concentrated on a few families in a country village, which she once described to her niece Anna, an aspiring novelist, as the very thing to work on: three or four families in a country village. Within that small frame she achieved a new kind of realism: ordinary events, such as a picnic, a ball or a quarrel over a game of cards, carry great moral and emotional weight.

Her influence on later fiction is hard to overstate. Historians of the novel often treat her as a key figure in the shift from the eighteenth-century novel of incident to the nineteenth-century novel of consciousness, which leads to George Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), praised Austen as a woman who wrote without bitterness or fear, in her own sentence and on her own terms, despite writing in a shared sitting room where she could be interrupted at any moment.

The cottage at Chawton where she wrote and revised her mature novels is now a museum, Jane Austen’s House, and the small table at which she is said to have written is one of its best-known objects. Steventon rectory, her birthplace, was demolished in the nineteenth century.

Much of what we know about Austen comes from her letters, but the record is badly damaged. Her sister Cassandra destroyed most of them after Jane’s death and cut passages from others; of perhaps three thousand letters, about 160 survive. There are, for example, no surviving letters from certain periods, including much of 1801–1804. The standard scholarly edition is Deirdre Le Faye’s edition of the Letters (Oxford University Press). Biographers must therefore reconstruct Austen’s inner life from fragments, family memoirs and the novels themselves, and they disagree about how much the novels can be read as autobiography.

The family memoirs are themselves a problem. Henry Austen’s notice and James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir were written partly to present a respectable, pious image, and they downplay her sharpness and professional ambition. Modern biographies, such as Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life (1997), try to read past these family portraits. Even the only authenticated portraits, sketches by Cassandra, are few; the best known, in the National Portrait Gallery in London, was later softened for engravings.

Few manuscripts of the novels survive. Of the six published novels, the only surviving manuscript material is two cancelled chapters of Persuasion. What does survive in her hand is mainly the Juvenilia, Lady Susan, the unfinished novels The Watsons and Sanditon, and some other pieces. These are now brought together in the digital edition Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, edited by Kathryn Sutherland and hosted by the universities of Oxford and King’s College London. The working drafts, with their crossings-out and irregular punctuation, have challenged the old idea that Austen wrote with effortless polish and raised questions about how much her published texts were shaped by printers and editors.

Even her cause of death is uncertain. Since the 1960s the most common suggestion has been Addison’s disease, a failure of the adrenal glands; others have proposed Hodgkin’s lymphoma or other conditions. The evidence, mainly descriptions of her symptoms in her own late letters, is too limited to settle the question.

Critics have long argued about Austen’s politics. Marilyn Butler, in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), placed her in the conservative, anti-Jacobin reaction to the French Revolution, arguing that her novels defend inherited social order and self-discipline against radical individualism. Claudia L. Johnson, in Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (1988), replied that Austen used the conventions of the conservative novel to expose the failures of paternal authority and the injustices women suffered, placing her closer to writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft than was once assumed.

Feminist criticism more broadly has asked whether Austen’s marriage plots accept or question the system that made marriage women’s main career. Some readers see her endings as a comic resolution that rewards moral growth; others see an ironic awareness that happy endings are rare and lucky exceptions. The novels themselves allow both readings, which is one reason they remain alive in debate.

Postcolonial criticism brought a new question. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said argued that Mansfield Park takes for granted the colonial wealth from Antigua that supports the English country house, and that the novel’s silence about slavery is itself meaningful. Other critics have answered that Austen, who admired the anti-slavery writer Thomas Clarkson according to one of her letters, deliberately raises the issue through Fanny’s unanswered question. The exchange has made Mansfield Park one of the most discussed novels in debates about literature and empire.

Finally, scholars of style, such as D. A. Miller in Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (2003), have studied how Austen’s impersonal, perfectly controlled narrative voice works, and what it means that a single woman of modest means created a voice of such authority. Such studies connect her techniques to the long history of the novel from Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney, whom she admired, to the modern psychological novel.