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2. Jane Austen
Life
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, England, in 1775, where she lived for the
first twenty-five years of her life. Her father, George Austen, was the
rector of the local parish and taught her largely at home. She began to
write while still in her teens and completed the original manuscript of
Pride and Prejudice, titled First Impressions, between 1796 and
1797. A publisher rejected the manuscript, and it was not until 1809 that
Austen began the revision, which brought it to the final form. Pride and
Prejudice was published in January 1813, two years after Sense and
Sensibility—her first novel, achieved a popularity that has endured to
present days. Austen published four more novels: Mansfield Park, Emma,
Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. The last two were published in
1818, a year after her death.
During Austen’s life, however, only her immediate
family knew her authorship of these novels. At one point, she wrote behind a
door that creaked when visitors approached; this warning allowed her to hide
manuscripts before anyone could enter. Though publishing anonymously
prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it also enabled her to
preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a female’s
entrance into the public sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity.
Additionally, Austen may have sought anonymity because of the more general
atmosphere of repression pervading her era. As the
Napoleonic Wars
(1800–1815) threatened the safety of monarchies throughout Europe,
government censorship of literature proliferated.
Austen lived in the social milieu of
Regency England,
which was particularly stratified; and the class divisions were rooted in
family connections and wealth. In her work, Austen was often critical to the
assumptions and prejudices of the English upper class. She distinguished the
internal merit (goodness of person) and external merit (rank and
possessions). Though she frequently satirized snobs, she also poked fun at
the poor breeding and misbehaviors of those lower on the social scale.
Nevertheless, Austen was in many ways a realist, and the England she
depicted is the one in which social mobility is limited and
class-consciousness is strong.
Socially regimented ideas of appropriate behavior for each gender factored
into Austen’s work as well. While social advancement for young men lay in
the military, church, or law, the chief method of self-improvement for women
was the acquisition of wealth. Women could only accomplish this goal through
successful marriage, which explains the ubiquity of matrimony as a goal and
topic of conversation in Austen’s writing. Though young women of Austen’s
day had more freedom to choose their husbands than in the early eighteenth
century, practical considerations continued to limit their options.
Even so, critics often accuse Austen of portraying a limited world. As a
clergyman’s daughter, Austen would have done parish work and was certainly
aware of the poor around her. However, she wrote about her own world, not
theirs. The critiques she makes on the class structure seem to include only
the middle and upper class; the lower classes, if they appear at all, are
generally servants who seem perfectly pleased with their lot. This lack of
interest in the lives of the poor may be a failure on Austen’s part, but it
should be understood as a failure shared by almost all of English society at
the time.
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet (minor gentry),
their five daughters, and the various Romantic adventures at their
Hertfordshire residence of Longbourn. The parents’ characters are greatly
contrasted: Mr. Bennet being a wise and witty gentleman, while Mrs. Bennet
is permanently distracted by the issue of marrying off her daughters at any
cost. The reason for Mrs. Bennet’s obsession is that after Mr. Bennet’s
death, their estate will pass by law to his closest blood relative: his
cousin, the Reverend William Collins (a fatuous, tactless and pompous man).
Austen’s tale is spurred on by the arrival of the young and wealthy bachelor
Charles Bingley and his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy. At first, due to
Elizabeth’s prejudice, she rejects Darcy out of her own petulant will. While
Darcy, on the other hand, having been brought up in such a way that he began
to scorn all those outside his own social circle, must overcome his pride in
order to see that Elizabeth would be a good wife for him and to win
Elizabeth’s heart. While at last through a range of matters, the
misunderstanding dissolves: the eldest daughter Jane gets married to Bingley,
the second daughter Elizabeth is eventually united to Darcy.
The subject matter that all of Jane Austen’s novels related to was the
matter of getting married, which in fact was the central problem for the
young leisure class lady of that age. Austen was critical to the gender
injustices presented in 19th century English society. The novel demonstrates
how money is needed by the girls on marrying men who they are not in love
with but simply for the purpose of gaining financial security, such as the
case of Charlotte. The entailment of Mr. Bennet’s estate leaves his
daughters in a poor financial situation that both requires them to marry
well and makes it more difficult to marry well. Clearly, Austen believed
that women are at least as intelligent and capable as men; and she
considered their inferior status in society to be unjust. She herself went
against convention by remaining single and earning a living through her
novels. In her personal letters Austen advised friends only to marry for
love. Through the plot of the novel it is clear that Austen wants to show
how Elizabeth is able to be happy by refusing to marry for financial
purposes and only marrying a man whom she truly loves and esteems.
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