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Pride and Prejudice
is usually considered to be the most popular one of Austen’s novels. It was
published in 1813, as Jane Austen’s earliest work, and in some senses also
one of her most mature works. Austen began writing the novel in 1796 at the
age of twenty-one, under the title “First Impressions”. The original version
of the novel was probably in the form of an exchange of letters. Austen’s
father had offered her manuscript for publication in 1797, but the
publishing company refused to even consider it. Shortly after completing
First Impressions, Austen began writing Sense and Sensibility,
which was not published until 1811. She also wrote some minor works during
that time, which were later expanded into full novels. Between 1810 and 1812
Pride and Prejudice was rewritten for publication. While the original
ideas of the novel come from a girl of 21, the final version has the
literary and thematic maturity of a thirty-five year old woman who has spent
years painstakingly drafting and revising, as is the pattern with all of
Austen’s works.
Contribution
In general, Austen occupies a curious position between
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her favorite writer, whom she often
quotes in her novels, was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great model of the
eighteenth century Classicism. Her plots, which often feature characters
forging their respective ways through an established and rigid social
hierarchy, bear similarities to such works as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.
Austen’s novels also display an ambiguity about emotion and an appreciation
for intelligence and natural beauty that aligns them with Romanticism. In
the novels’ awareness of the conditions of modernity and city life, the
consequences of family structure and individual characters, they prefigure
much Victorian literature (as does her usage of such elements as frequent
formal social gatherings, sketchy characters, and scandal).
The works of Jane Austen, like Pride and Prejudice, Sense
and Sensibility and Emma, well received from their publication
onward, are very different in style from the Romanticism favored by her
contemporaries. With trenchant observation and meticulous detail, she
presented the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class
English. Vivid character drawing has become her distinctive style. Her
characters, even the most minor ones, are lively portrayed in lucid
language.
Austen’s novels are mostly concerned with young women’s
social growth and self-discovery. Nearly all of them explore a consistent
theme that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. Faults of the
character display by the people of her novels are corrected when, through
various trials and misunderstandings, lessons are learned.
Jane Austen was among the first English women to break the
male monopoly of novel writing. Her brilliantly witty, elegantly structured
satirical novels vividly described the life of common people in the
countryside. Her main literary concern is about human beings in their social
relationships. Her novels reveal in subtle yet determined manner the beauty
of women (not only the physical beauty), and their longing for freedom in
marriage life. Her unique sensitivity to human emotions, her careful
observation of the hypocrisy of the middle-class Englishmen, and their male
chauvinistic attitude towards women, made her one of the finest novelists of
the age.
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