Jane Austen
Life
Jane Austen
was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon, where her father, the Reverend
George Austen, was rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a
family of eight-six boys and two girls. Her closest companion throughout her
life was her elder sister, Cassandra; neither Jane nor Cassandra married. Their
father was a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. His
wife, Cassandra (née Leigh), was a woman of ready wit, famed for her impromptu verses
and stories. The great family amusement was acting.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1099445159
Jane Austen’s
lively and affectionate family circle provided a stimulating context for her
writing. Moreover, her experience was carried far beyond Steventon rectory by
an extensive network of relationships by blood and friendship. It was this
world—of the minor landed gentry and the country clergy, in the village, the
neighborhood, and the country town, with occasional visits to Bath and to London—that she was to use in the settings,
characters, and subject matter of her novels.
Her earliest
known writings date from about 1787, and between then and 1793 she wrote a large body of material that has survived in three manuscript notebooks: Volume the First, Volume the Second,
and Volume
the Third. These contain plays, verses, short novels, and other
prose and show Austen engaged in the parody of existing literary forms, notably the genres of
the sentimental novel and sentimental comedy. Her passage
to a more serious view of life from the exuberant high spirits and extravagances
of her earliest writings is evident in Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel written about 1793–94 (and
not published until 1871). This portrait of a woman bent on the exercise of her
own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction is,
in effect, a study of frustration and of woman’s fate in a society that has no
use for her talents.
In 1802 it seems likely that Jane agreed to marry Harris
Bigg-Wither, the 21-year-old heir of a Hampshire family, but the next morning
changed her mind. There are also a number of mutually contradictory stories
connecting her with someone with whom she fell in love but who died very soon
after. Since Austen’s novels are so deeply concerned with love and marriage,
there is some point in attempting to establish the facts of these
relationships. Unfortunately, the evidence is unsatisfactory and incomplete.
Cassandra was a jealous guardian of her sister’s private life, and after Jane’s
death she censored the surviving letters, destroying many and cutting up
others. But Jane Austen’s own novels provide indisputable evidence that their
author understood the experience of love and of love disappointed.
The
real reason Jane Austen never married
One
of the greatest writers in the English language, Jane Austen (1775–1817) is
famed for her works of romantic fiction including Sense and
Sensibility (1811); Pride and Prejudice (1813); Mansfield
Park (1814) and Emma (1816). But while Jane’s literary heroines
enjoyed romantic wedded bliss, Austen herself remained unmarried all her
life.
Jane Austen’s present-day popularity derives chiefly from the fact
her heroines, although two centuries old, act as romantic beacons for the
modern age. With a universal message of marrying for love rather than money,
they provide examples, albeit fictional, of women choosing husbands due to
strings of the heart and not of the purse.
If the old adage ‘write what you know’ is applied to Austen’s
writing, then she should have had one of the happiest marriages in the history
of matrimony. But here lies the paradox. One of the supreme purveyors of
romantic love in English literature, and the creator of numerous blissful
couplings in print, never took her own trip down the aisle.
The whitewashing of Jane’s public persona began almost immediately
after her death in 1817 with the autobiographical note her brother, Henry,
wrote to preface the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
This meant that the question as to why this was so never really entered the
equation. The mere fact that Jane did not find a Mr Darcy in real life and so
lived – it seemed – as a virtuous Christian ‘spinster’ was enough to satisfy
Victorian curiosity.
The most contentious hypothesis puts forward the assumption Jane
Austen did not marry for the simple reason her sexuality was orientated towards
other women. In other words, she was a lesbian. The evidence, however, is
simply not there to support this.
We know of the early romance with Tom Lefroy, who would later
become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, which was called off not by Jane due to
any burgeoning doubt about her own sexuality, but by his family due to the
penniless status of the would-be lovers. And this was the age, lest we forget, at
least for the middling classes and above, when marrying for money was a fact of
life and the yardstick by which all potential partners – male and female – were
measured.
There was also the mystery seaside rendezvous,
where it is said Jane fell in love with a young clergyman and he with her.
Their infatuation blossomed over several weeks during one of the Austen
family’s regular summer breaks while they lived in Bath, and the lovers made
arrangements to meet the following year. Sadly, when the time came for their
reunion, news arrived saying that the clergyman had died during the intervening
period. In 2009 Dr Andrew Norman named this clergyman as Samuel Blackall, but
claims Blackall did not die but rather went on to marry someone else.
And then, of course, there was an actual proposal
of marriage and acceptance of it. While Jane and her sister, Cassandra, were
staying with friends, the Bigg sisters, at their residence, Manydown, Hants, in
December 1802, their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither (the additional
surname having been adopted for males of the family during the late 18th
century) took it upon himself to integrate the families further by one evening
proposing to Jane. Although he was six years younger than her she accepted, but
after what can only have been a dark night of the soul rescinded it the
following morning and hastily bid a retreat by carriage back to Steventon and
then to Bath.
It could be argued that if there were any hint of
lesbianism in Jane then surely she would simply have not accepted the offer in
the first place, or else would not have changed her mind (enjoying the
financial security the marriage brought, while at the same time free to enjoy
her sexuality outside of the relationship). The reality is that any relations
Jane did have with the same sex were either genuine friendships, or else those
normally shared with relatives.
The fact that Jane Austen remained single all her
life, while her literary heroines enjoyed both romantic wedded bliss and
financial security, is one of English literature’s greatest ironies. The simple
fact is, though, that even if Jane had herself experienced a happy marriage
with a husband only too obliging for her to continue writing, with the prospect
of possibly a large family to bring up Jane may not have had the time to write
to the extent she did and so develop her incredible talent that is so revered
today.
So, to reiterate, by not marrying, Jane allowed
herself the time and space to develop her talent unhindered by domestic duties
or conjugal obligations. She sacrificed financial security and matrimonial
happiness in order to retain the freedom to write and develop as a true artist.
It is perhaps because of that choice Jane Austen is considered one of the
greatest literary talents of all time.
Austen’s Death
In 1816, Austen started to feel ill with what was
probably Addison's disease, a hormonal disorder that doctors at the time hadn't
yet learned to treat effectively. She was working on two novels, Northanger
Abbey (the novel previously titled Susan that she had
bought back from the lazy publisher) and Persuasion, but the
disease zapped her energy and slowed her progress. In May 1817, she and
Cassandra moved to Winchester in order to be closer to Austen's doctors. Just
two months later, on 18 July 1817, Jane Austen died. She was buried in
Winchester Cathedral.
After Death
A few months after her death, Austen's brother
Henry published her two final novels together in a single volume. He included
an autobiographical note that identified Austen for the first time as the
author of her work. The novels fell out of popularity after a few years, until
Austen's nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published a biography of his aunt
entitled A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869. The memoir sparked a
renewed interest in the writer. In 1883 the first popular editions of her
novels were issued, igniting a widespread fandom that continues to this day.
Fans' passion for her work was such that the literary critic Leslie Stephens
(who was also Virginia Woolf's dad) dubbed it "Austenolatry," whose
practitioners eventually began to call themselves Janeites.
About Pride and Prejudice
In 1796, when
Austen was twenty-one years old, she wrote the novel First
Impressions. The work was rewritten and published under the
title Pride and Prejudice in 1813. It is her most popular and
perhaps her greatest novel. It achieves this distinction by virtue of its
perfection of form, which exactly balances and expresses its human content. As
in Sense and Sensibility, the descriptive terms in the title
are closely associated with the two main characters.
The form of
the novel is dialectical—the opposition of ethical (conforming or not
conforming to standards of conduct and moral reason) principles is expressed in
the relations of believable characters. The resolution of the main plot with
the marriage of the two opposites represents a reconciliation of conflicting
moral extremes. The value of pride is affirmed when humanized by the wife's
warm personality, and the value of prejudice is affirmed when associated with
the husband's standards of traditional honor.
Jane Austen's Works
Novels
·
1811 - Sense and Sensibility
·
1813 - Pride and Prejudice
·
1814 - Mansfield Park
·
1815 - Emma
·
1818 - Northanger Abbey (posthumous)
·
1818 - Persuasion (posthumous)
Short fiction
·
1794, 1805 - Lady Susan
Unfinished fiction
·
1804 - The Watsons
·
1817 - Sanditon
Other works
·
1793, 1800 - Sir Charles Grandison
·
1815 - Plan of a Novel
·
Poems
·
Prayers
·
Letters
Juvenilia - Volume the First
The
Juvenilia is comprised of several notebooks Jane Austen wrote during her
youth.
·
Frederic & Elfrida
·
Jack & Alice
·
Edgar & Emma
·
Henry and Eliza
·
The Adventures of Mr. Harley
·
Sir William Mountague
·
Memoirs of Mr. Clifford
·
The Beautifull Cassandra
·
Amelia Webster
·
The Visit
·
The Mystery
·
The Three Sisters
·
A beautiful description
·
The generous Curate
·
Ode to Pity
Juvenilia - Volume the Second
·
Love and Friendship
·
Lesley Castle
·
The History of England
·
A Collection of Letters
·
The female philosopher
·
The first Act of a Comedy
·
A Letter from a Young Lady
·
A Tour through Wales
·
A Tale
Juvenilia - Volume the Third
·
Evelyn
·
Catharine, or the Bower
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