Introduction

Jane Austen-An Influential Woman, She’s Not Just a Writer,

She’s A Cult, A Brand and A Cultural Touchstone.
Jane Austen was a romantic novelist who captivated English
readers with her inspired writing skills. Even today, readers
all over the world learn to enjoy her writing style and the
settings among the landed gentry, a largely historical British
social class, consisting of landowners who could live entirely
off rental income, during a time when a woman's place was
considered to be in the home and subservient to the male.
Jane Austen was reflective of her times in that she
understood women needed marriage or were reliant on
families. Yet, her female characters incorporated free wills
and minds of their own. Also, Jane Austen grew up during a
time where women were excluded from many things in
society, she broke through as an influential writer who
overcame the education barrier faced by young women her
age and succeeded with a writing style that was all her own.
Jane Austen's influence on literature is quite significant and
would be altered today without her, because her writing
encouraged other females to write, even if that meant using
a male pen name, she wrote about real life in her period of
time and made people feel like they were right there
experiencing the stories with her, and her legacy also reaches
into modern literature through the continuous influence of
her themes and characters.
 Chapter I-Biography
Early life

There is little biographical information about Jane Austen's

life except the few letters that survive and the biographical
notes her family members wrote.
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. 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 neighbourhood,
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.
 Early manuscripts

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.

Biographical sources

During her lifetime, Austen may have written as many as

3,000 letters, but only 161 survived. Many of the letters were
written to Austen's older sister Cassandra, who in 1843
burned the greater part of them and cut pieces out of those
she kept. Ostensibly, Cassandra destroyed or censored her
sister's letters to prevent their falling into the hands of
relatives and ensuring that "younger nieces did not read any
of Jane Austen's sometimes acid or forthright comments on
neighbours or family members". Cassandra believed that in
the interest of tact and Jane's penchant for forthrightness,
these details should be destroyed. The paucity of record of
Austen's life leaves modern biographers little with which to
work.

The situation was compounded as successive generations of

the family expunged and sanitised the already opaque details
of Austen's biography. The heirs of Jane's brother, Admiral
Francis Austen, destroyed more letters; details were excised
from the "Biographical Notice" her brother wrote in 1818;
and family details continued to be omitted or embellished in
her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869,
and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography
Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913.The
legend the family and relatives created reflects their biases in
favour of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying a woman whose
domestic situation was happy and whose family was the
mainstay of her life. Austen scholar Jan Fergus explains that
modern biographies tend to include details excised from the
letters and family biographical materials, but that the
challenge is to avoid the polarising view that Austen
experienced periods of deep unhappiness and was "an
embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly
unpleasant family".
But Jane Austen’s own novels provide indisputable evidence
that their author understood the experience of love and of
love disappointed.

The earliest of her novels published during her lifetime,

Sense and Sensibility, was begun about 1795 as a novel-in-
letters called “Elinor and Marianne,” after its heroines.
Between October 1796 and August 1797 Austen completed
the first version of Pride and Prejudice, then called “First
Impressions.” In 1797 her father wrote to offer it to a London
publisher for publication, but the offer was declined.
Northanger Abbey, the last of the early novels, was written
about 1798 or 1799, probably under the title “Susan.” In
1803 the manuscript of “Susan” was sold to the publisher
Richard Crosby for £10. He took it for immediate publication,
but, although it was advertised, unaccountably it never
appeared.

Education

In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford

to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them with her
to Southampton when she moved there later in the year. In
the autumn both girls were sent home when they caught
typhus and Austen nearly died. Austen was from then home
educated, until she attended boarding school in Reading with
her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls'
School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle, who possessed a cork leg
and a passion for theatre. The school curriculum probably
included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and
music and, perhaps, drama. The sisters returned home
before December 1786 because the school fees for the two
girls were too high for the Austen family. After 1786, Austen
"never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her
immediate family environment".

The remainder of her education came from reading, guided

by her father and brothers James and Henry. Irene Collins
believes that Austen "used some of the same school books as
the boys" her father tutored. Austen apparently had
unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a
family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections
amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also
tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing,
and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other
materials for their writing and drawing.

Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen's

education. From her early childhood, the family and friends
staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard
Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick's Bon Ton.
Austen's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and
epilogues and she probably joined in these activities, first as a
spectator and later as a participant. Most of the plays were
comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were
cultivated. At the age of 12, she tried her own hand at
dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her
teenage years

Bath and Southampton

Up to this time the tenor of life at Steventon rectory had

been propitious for Jane Austen’s growth as a novelist. In
December 1800 George Austen unexpectedly announced his
decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and
move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath. While retirement
and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was
shocked to be told she was moving from the only home she
had ever known. An indication of her state of mind is her lack
of productivity as a writer during the time she lived at Bath.
She was able to make some revisions to Susan, and she
began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but
there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–
1799.Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression
disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing
Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her
creative life, except for a few months after her father died. It
is often claimed that Austen was unhappy in Bath, which
caused her to lose interest in writing, but it is just as possible
that Austen's social life in Bath prevented her from spending
much time writing novels.The critic Robert Irvine argued that
if Austen spent more time writing novels when she was in the
countryside, it might just have been because she had more
spare time as opposed to being more happy in the
countryside as is often argued. Furthermore, Austen
frequently both moved and travelled over southern England
during this period, which was hardly a conducive
environment for writing a long novel. Austen sold the rights
to publish Susan to a publisher Crosby & Company, who paid
her £10. The Crosby & Company advertised Susan, but never
published it.

The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space

for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters
from her sister in this period for unknown reasons. In
December 1802 Austen received her only known proposal of
marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine
Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger
brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his
education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither
proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline
Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a
descendant, Harris was not attractive — he was a large, plain-
looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak,
was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely
tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were
young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to
Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family
estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up.
With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a
comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and,
perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next
morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and
withdrew her acceptance.No contemporary letters or diaries
describe how Austen felt about this proposal. Irvine
described Bigg-Wither as somebody who "...seems to have
been a man very hard to like, let alone love".

In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight,

who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling
her that "having written so much on one side of the question,
I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself
farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do
like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than
marrying without Affection". The English scholar Douglas
Bush wrote that Austen had "had a very high ideal of the love
that should unite a husband and wife ... All of her heroines ...
know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent
love".[86] A possible autobiographical element in Sense and
Sensibility occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates that
"the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection
for life" with an unsuitable man.
In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started, but did not
complete her novel, The Watsons. The story centres on an
invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried
daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the
harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives".Honan
suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop
work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805
and her personal circumstances resembled those of her
characters too closely for her comfort.

Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and

their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward,
James, Henry, and Francis Austen (known as Frank) pledged
to make annual contributions to support their mother and
sisters. For the next four years, the family's living
arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent
part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the
city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon and
Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the
newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex
coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. It was here
that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady
Susan and added its "Conclusion". In 1806 the family moved
to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank
Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent
visiting various branches of the family.

On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's

move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard
Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to
secure the immediate publication of the novel, and
requesting the return of the original so she could find
another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to
publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that
Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had
paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the
resources to buy the copyright back at that time, but was
able to purchase it in 1816.

A New Start for Jane Austen

Eventually, in 1809, Jane’s brother Edward was able to

provide his mother and sisters with a large cottage in the
village of Chawton, within his Hampshire estate, not far from
Steventon. The prospect of settling at Chawton had already
given Jane Austen a renewed sense of purpose, and she
began to prepare “Sense and Sensibility” and “Pride and
Prejudice” for publication. She was encouraged by her
brother Henry, who acted as go-between with her publishers.
She was probably also prompted by her need for money. Two
years later Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and
Sensibility, which came out, anonymously, in November
1811. Both of the leading reviews, the Critical Review and the
Quarterly Review, welcomed its blend of instruction and
amusement.

Valuable Works

Meanwhile, in 1811 Austen had begun “Mansfield Park”,

which was finished in 1813 and published in 1814. By then
she was an established (though anonymous) author; Egerton
had published “Pride and Prejudice” in January 1813, and
later that year there were second editions of “Pride and
Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility”.
“Pride and Prejudice” seems to have been the fashionable
novel of its season. Between January 1814 and March 1815
she wrote “Emma”, which appeared in December 1815. In
1816 there was a second edition of “Mansfield Park”,
published, like “Emma”, by Lord Byron’s publisher, John
Murray. “Persuasion” (written August 1815–August 1816)
was published posthumously, with Northanger Abbey, in
December 1817.

The years after 1811 seem to have been the most rewarding
of her life. She had the satisfaction of seeing her work in print
and well reviewed and of knowing that the novels were
widely read. They were so much enjoyed by the prince regent
(later George IV) that he had a set in each of his residences,
and “Emma”, at a discreet royal command, was “respectfully
dedicated” to him. The reviewers praised the novels for their
morality and entertainment, admired the character drawing,
and welcomed the domestic realism as a refreshing change
from the romantic melodrama then in vogue.

For the last 18 months of her life, Austen was busy writing.
Early in 1816, at the onset of her fatal illness, she set down
the burlesque Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from
Various Quarters (first published in 1871). Until August 1816
she was occupied with Persuasion, and she looked again at
the manuscript of “Susan” (Northanger Abbey).

Illness and death

Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the

warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was
unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration.
The majority of biographers rely on Dr. Vincent Cope's 1964
retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as
Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been
described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma. When her
uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively
disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse, writing, "I
am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought
on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves".

She continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with

the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters,
which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817 Austen
began The Brothers (titled Sanditon when published in 1925),
and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-
March 1817, probably due to illness. Todd describes
Sanditon's heroine, Diana Parker, as an "energetic invalid". In
the novel, Austen mocked hypochondriacs and though she
describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning
the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning "every
wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa". She put down
her pen on 18 March 1817, making a note of it.

Austen made light of her condition, describing it as "bile" and

rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced
difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was
confined to bed. In May Cassandra and Henry brought her to
Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered
agonising pain and welcomed death. Austen died in
Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. Henry, through
his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in
the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The
epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's
personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and
mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but
does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.

Her authorship was announced to the world at large by her

brother Henry, who supervised the publication of Northanger
Abbey and Persuasion. There was no recognition at the time
that regency England had lost its keenest observer and
sharpest analyst; no understanding that a miniaturist (as she
maintained that she was and as she was then seen), a
“merely domestic” novelist, could be seriously concerned
with the nature of society and the quality of its culture; no
grasp of Jane Austen as a historian of the emergence of
regency society into the modern world. During her lifetime
there had been a solitary response in any way adequate to
the nature of her achievement: Sir Walter Scott’s review of
Emma in the Quarterly Review for March 1816, where he
hailed this “nameless author” as a masterful exponent of
“the modern novel” in the new realist tradition. After her
death, there was for long only one significant essay, the
review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in the Quarterly
for January 1821 by the theologian Richard Whately.
Together, Scott’s and Whately’s essays provided the
foundation for serious criticism of Jane Austen: their insights
were appropriated by critics throughout the 19th century.

Chapter 2-Styles and Themes of Jane Austen

Styles
Parody and burlesque
Austen's juvenile writings are parodies and burlesques of
popular 18th-century genres, such as the sentimental novel.
She humorously demonstrates that the reversals of social
convention common in sentimental novels, such as contempt
for parental guidance, are ridiculously impractical; her
characters "are dead to all common sense". Her interest in
these comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of
novelist Frances Burney and playwrights Richard Sheridan
and David Garrick, continued less overtly throughout her
professional career.

Austen's burlesque is characterized by its mocking imitation

and its exaggerated, displaced emphasis. For example, in
Northanger Abbey, she ridicules the plot improbabilities and
rigid conventions of the Gothic novel. However, she does not
categorically reject the Gothic. As Austen scholar Claudia
Johnson argues, Austen pokes fun at the "stock gothic
machinery—storms, cabinets, curtains, manuscripts—with
blithe amusement", but she takes the threat of the tyrannical
father seriously. Austen uses parody and burlesque not only
for comedic effect, but also, according to feminist critics, to
reveal how both sentimental and Gothic novels warped the
lives of women who attempted to live out the roles depicted
in them. As Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain in their
seminal work, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Austen
makes fun of "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the
primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the
chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the
heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial
considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents"
Irony
Irony is one of Austen's most characteristic and most
discussed literary techniques. She contrasts the plain
meaning of a statement with the comic, undermining the
meaning of the original to create ironic disjunctions. In her
juvenile works, she relies upon satire, parody and irony based
on incongruity. Her mature novels employ irony to
foreground social hypocrisy.

In particular Austen uses irony to critique the marriage

market. Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen
is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of
a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." At first glance,
the sentence is straightforward and plausible, but the plot of
the novel contradicts it: it is women without fortunes who
need husbands and seek them out. By the end of the novel,
the truth of the statement is acknowledged only by a single
character, Mrs. Bennet, a mother seeking husbands for her
daughters.
Austen's irony goes beyond the sentence level. As Austen
scholar Jan Fergus explains, " The major structural device in
Pride and Prejudice is the creation of ironies within the
novel's action which, like parallels and contrasts, challenge
the reader's attention and judgment throughout, and in the
end also engage his feelings." Austen's irony illuminates the
foibles of individual characters and her society. In her later
novels, in particular, she turns her irony "against the errors of
law, manners and customs, in failing to recognize women as
the accountable beings they are, or ought to be".

Free indirect speech

Austen is most renowned for her development of free
indirect speech, a technique pioneered by 18th-century
novelists Henry Fielding and Frances Burney. In free indirect
speech, the thoughts and speech of the characters mix with
the voice of the narrator. Austen uses it to provide
summaries of conversations or to compress, dramatically or
ironically, a character's speech and thoughts. In Sense and
Sensibility, Austen experiments extensively for the first time
with this technique. For example, Mrs John Dashwood did
not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his
sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of
their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most
dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the
subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child,
and his only child too, of so large a sum?
As Austen scholar Norman Page explains, "the first sentence
is straight narrative, in the 'voice' of the [narrator]; the third
sentence is normal indirect speech; but the second and
fourth are what is usually described as free indirect speech."
In these two sentences, Austen represents the inner
thoughts of the character and creates the illusion that the
reader is entering the character's mind. She often uses
indirect speech for background characters. However, Page
writes that "for Jane Austen ... the supreme virtue of free
indirect speech ... [is] that it offers the possibility of achieving
something of the vividness of speech without the appearance
for a moment of a total silencing of the authorial voice."

Conversation and language

Compared to other early 19th-century novels, Austen's have
little narrative or scenic description—they contain much
more dialogue, whether spoken between characters, written
as free indirect speech, or represented through letters. For
example, in Pride and Prejudice, which began as an epistolary
novel, letters play a decisive role in the protagonist's
education and the opening chapters are theatrical in tone.
Austen's conversations contain many short sentences,
question and answer pairs, and rapid exchanges between
characters, most memorable perhaps in the witty repartee
between Elizabeth and Darcy.
Austen grants each of her characters a distinctive and subtly
constructed voice: they are carefully distinguished by their
speech. For example, Admiral Croft is marked by his naval
slang in Persuasion and Mr. Woodhouse is marked by his
hypochondriacal language in Emma. However, it is the
misuse of language that most distinguishes Austen's
characters. As Page explains, in Sense and Sensibility, for
example, the inability of characters such as Lucy Steele to use
language properly is a mark of their "moral confusion". In
Catharine, or the Bower, Camilla can only speak in
fashionable stock phrases which convey no meaning. She is
unable to express real feeling, since all of her emotions are
mediated through empty hyperbole. Austen uses
conversations about literature in particular to establish an
implicit moral frame of reference. In Catharine, or the Bower,
for example, Catharine makes moral judgments about
Camilla based on her superficial and conventional comments
about literature.

Genre
Jane Austen famously wrote to her nephew James Edward
Austen that his "strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of
Variety and Glow" would not fit on "the little bit (two Inches
wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as
produces little effect after much labour." Austen novels have
often been characterized as "country house novels" or as
"comedies of manners". Comedies of manners are concerned
"with the relations and intrigues of gentlemen and ladies
living in a polished and sophisticated society" and the
comedy is the result of "violations of social conventions and
decorum, and relies for its effect in great part on the wit and
sparkle of the dialogue." However, Austen's novels also have
important fairy tale elements to them. Pride and Prejudice
follows the traditional Cinderella plot while "Persuasion
rewrites the Cinderella narrative, as it shifts the fairy tale's
emphasis from the heroine's transformation into a beauty to
the prince's second look at her face." However, Fanny, in
Mansfield Park, rejects the Prince Charming character and at
least one scholar has suggested that in this Austen is
signalling "a general attack on the dangers of 'fiction”.
Austen's novels can easily be situated within the 18th-
century novel tradition. Austen, like the rest of her family,
was a great novel reader. Her letters contain many allusions
to contemporary fiction, often to such small details as to
show that she was thoroughly familiar with what she read.
Austen read and reread novels, even minor ones. She read
widely within the genre, including many works considered
mediocre both then and now, but tended to emphasize
domestic fiction by women writers, and her own novels
contain many references to these works. For example, the
phrase "pride and prejudice" comes from Burney's Cecilia,
and the Wickham subplot in Pride and Prejudice is a parody
of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones.

Austen's early works are often structured around a pair of

characters. For example, Sense and Sensibility is a didactic
novel based on the contrast between the beliefs and conduct
of two heroines, a novel format that was particularly
fashionable in the 1790s and exemplified by Edgeworth's
Letters of Julia and Caroline and Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature
and Art. Because circulating libraries often used catalogues
that only listed a novel's name, Austen chose titles that
would have resonance for her readers; abstract comparisons
like "sense and sensibility" were part of a moralistic tradition
and eponymous heroine names were part of a new romantic
novel tradition. Elinor, representing "sense", and Marianne,
representing "sensibility", articulate a contrast "between two
modes of perception", according to Butler. "Marianne's way
is subjective, intuitive, implying confidence in the natural
goodness of human nature when untrammelled by
convention. Her view is corrected by the more cautious
orthodoxy of Elinor, who mistrusts her own desires, and
requires even her reason to seek the support of objective
evidence." However, other critics have argued that the
contrast between the two characters is not a strict binary.
For example, Marianne reasonably discusses propriety and
Elinor passionately loves Edward.

Between 1760 and 1820, conduct books reached the height

of their popularity in Britain; one scholar refers to the period
as "the age of courtesy books for women". Conduct books
integrated the styles and rhetorics of earlier genres, such as
devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and
works on household economy. They offered their readers a
description of (most often) the ideal woman while at the
same time handing out practical advice. Thus, not only did
they dictate morality, but they also guided readers' choice of
dress and outlined "proper" etiquette. Austen's fiction built
on and questioned the assumptions of this tradition, reacting
against conduct book writers such as Hannah More, John
Gregory, and Hester Chapone. Beginning with the juvenilia,
as early as Catharine, or the Bower, Austen viewed this genre
as thoroughly mindless and irrelevant to social realities.

Themes
Education and reading
Austen's plots are fundamentally about education; her
heroines undergo a "process through which they come to see
clearly themselves and their conduct" and thereby "become
better people". For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth
goes through a process of error, recognition of error,
remorse, and determination to do better. She realizes that
she was mistaken about both Wickham and Darcy. In
examining her mental processes, it dawns on her that she has
never been objective about Darcy. She understands that,
apart from her stubbornly maintained feelings of antipathy,
she has no objective reason to dislike or reject him:

She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy

nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had
been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. 'How despicably have
I acted!' she cried.—'I, who have prided myself on my
discernment! ... Pleased with the preference of one, and
offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning
of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and
ignorance, and driven reason away, where either was
concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.'

Austen's narratives move towards these moments of self-

realization, which are the most dramatic and memorable in
her novels. Austen is also attempting to educate readers,
particularly their emotions. For example, in Sense and
Sensibility and the later novels she focuses on eliciting
judgment and sympathy.

Throughout Austen's novels, reading is associated with

intellectual and moral development. Not all reading practices
result in "improvement," however. Those characters who
read superficially to accumulate knowledge for the purpose
of displaying their grasp of culture (such as Mary Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice), or of flaunting their social status, do not
benefit from this moral growth. The ideal reader is
represented in Elizabeth, who revises her opinion of Darcy by
rereading his letter and keeping herself open to
reinterpretations of it.
Morality
Morality, characterized by manners, duty to society and
religious seriousness, is a central theme of Austen's works.
Drawing on the Johnsonian tradition, Austen uses words such
as "duty" and "manners" consistently throughout her fiction
as signifiers of her ethical system. Manners for Austen are
not just etiquette, but also a moral code. According to one
important interpretation, Austen can be considered a
"conservative Christian moralist" whose view of society was
"ultimately founded in religious principle". However, Austen's
works are unique among her contemporaries in containing
few, if any, references to the Bible. Instead, she often refers
to works by moral poets such as William Cowper. Yet other
critics have pointed out that Mansfield Park can be seen as a
challenge to the conservative novels of the 1790s because
the character who most closely adheres to the values of
piety, filial obedience and modesty, Fanny, is the one most
harmed by the failures of conservative ideology.

Austen feared that economic considerations would overcome

moral considerations in human conduct; her most amoral
characters—Wickham, Mary Crawford, Mr. Elliot—are the
most economically motivated. Moral improvement in her
works is not only for the characters but also for the readers.
Her novels are intended to "instruct and to refine the
emotions along with the perceptions and the moral sense".
Believing in a complex moral conscience rather than an
innate moral sense, Austen felt that it was necessary to
inculcate readers with proper virtues by portraying morally
ambiguous characters from which they could learn. Although
she and Johnson shared a similar sense of morality, Johnson
argued that only one-dimensional characters could instill
virtue in readers. Burney and Austen by contrast are both
"interested in the emotions which make moral action difficult
and in the moral principles which complicate emotions".
Religion
Critics and commentators have long agreed that Austen was
"a conscientious and believing churchwoman." References in
her remaining letters suggest to Oliver McDonagh that
Austen was an orthodox Anglican, that she conceived of the
Anglican church (in patriotic terms) as national in character,
and that she was pleased with "the increasing religiosity and
advance in public morality" in England during her lifetime. In
1939 Canon Harold Anson argued that "Austen's novels are
religious not because they contain religious controversy or 'a
strong ecclesiastical motif' ... but because they show 'the
underlying principles upon which men live their lives and by
which they judge the characters of others'." According to
Gary Kelly, "this has become the dominant view of those
critics who find Austen to be a religious novelist. Austen's
style was heavily influenced by the language of the King
James Version of the Bible and, especially, by the Book of
Common Prayer, both of which Austen heard spoken every
week all of her life as a part of Anglican services. According to
Isabel Grundy, "the almost prehistorical authors of the Old
Testament have bequeathed her their rapidity and spareness
of narrative, the New Testament writers their remarkable
ability to enter the common mind and to conjure an illusion
of verisimilitude by means of a single detail ... her taste for
brief declarative sentences is something she shares with the
gospels." However, while Austen's style was heavily
influenced by these works, she seems to have decided not to
refer in her work directly to the Bible or other sacred works.
Doody points out that "she is singular among novelists of her
age in her refusal to admit references to the Bible, or to
biblical characters, scenes or stories."

Critics are uncertain about Austen's relationship to the rising

Evangelical movement within the Anglican Church of her day.
In the first two decades of the 19th century, Evangelicalism
became effective as a powerful upper-middle class pressure
group supporting reform of abuses and opposing vice.
According to Butler, whether or not Austen was sympathetic
to Evangelical religion, her works reflect society's growing
seriousness of tone and desire for reform. Other critics have
taken a more decisive stance on Austen's personal views. For
example, both MacDonagh and Waldron argue that she
personally disliked the movement. Waldron contends that
Austen would not have approved of the movement's
idealization of behaviour. MacDonagh believes that Austen's
letters and other private writings suggest that she became
more serious religiously as she became older. Mansfield Park
and Persuasion are the novels most often cited as examples
of Austen's growing religiosity. For example, Persuasion "is
subtly different from the laxer, more permissive social
atmosphere of the three novels Jane Austen began before
1800. In Mansfield Park, Fanny stands for spirituality and
proper morality. It is she who most clearly characterizes
Henry Crawford's affair with Maria in religious terms, in the
language of sin, guilt and punishment. She is portrayed as an
earnest, strict and struggling Christian, not perfect but trying
hard.

Gender
Austen's works critique the sentimental novels of the second
half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to
19th-century literary realism. The earliest English novelists,
Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were
followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such
as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe,
and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen
rejected, returning the novel on a "slender thread" to the
tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a "realistic study of
manners". In the mid-20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis
and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and
Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of "irony,
realism and satire to form an author superior to both".

Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy

sensationalism of much of modern fiction — 'the ephemeral
productions which supply the regular demand of watering
places and circulating libraries'". Yet her rejection of these
genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and
Emma. Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the
modern frantic novel in the "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads

Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according

to scholar Mary Lascelles "Few novelists can be more
scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts
of their characters." Techniques such as fragmentary speech
suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and
phrasing rather than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social
variants. Dialogue reveals a character's mood — frustration,
anger, happiness — each treated differently and often
through varying patterns of sentence structures. When
Elizabeth Bennett rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the
convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded
her.

Economic position of women

Austen's novels explore the precarious economic position of
women of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. As Gilbert
and Gubar explain, "Austen examines the female
powerlessness that underlies monetary pressure to marry,
the injustice of inheritance laws, the ignorance of women
denied formal education, the psychological vulnerability of
the heiress or widow, the exploited dependency of the
spinster, the boredom of the lady provided with no
vocation". In exploring these issues, she continued the
tradition of Burney's novels, particularly Cecilia (1782) and
Camilla (1796).

Worldly marriage is the theme of Austen's unfinished novel,

The Watsons, which portrays a female economy in which the
odds for marriage heavily favour those young women whose
fathers can and will pay a dowry. Physical attractiveness and
"accomplishments" are helpful but insufficient in the absence
of adequate funds for a marriage settlement. After Mr.
Watson dies, the family does not have sufficient money for
the dowries or support of the four daughters. As historian
Oliver MacDonagh writes, "atrimony was their only hope of
escape from current penury and future ruin or near-ruin.
Dowerless, they were pursuing it with varying degrees of
ruthlessness."

MacDonagh points out that none of the marriages in Austen's

fiction of which she approved was financially imprudent. For
Austen, marriage and children were a girl's natural and best
aspiration. She advocated sincere attachment, material
prudence and circumspect delay in the choice of a marriage
partner. If the appropriate conditions were met, then
marriage should follow. Austen realized that women without
independent means felt very great pressure to marry
someone who could look after them, because otherwise they
would be a burden on their families. The marriage market
that she describes is quite detailed and well understood by
all concerned. For example, as is explained in Mansfield Park,
"Miss Maria Ward, 'with only seven thousand pounds', had
the good luck to captivate a baronet, 'her uncle, the lawyer,
allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of
any equitable claim to it'. To indulge in a marriage less
lucrative than might have been expected was regarded as
'throwing oneself away', and someone like Mary Crawford,
who prided herself on her realism, could

Published author
At the time, married British women did not have the legal
power to sign contracts, and it was common for a woman
wishing to publish to have a male relative represent her to
sign the contract. Like most women authors at the time,
Austen had to publish her books anonymously. At the time,
the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and
writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form
of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was
felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were
usually published anonymously in order to maintain the
conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of
part-time job, and was not seeking to become a "literacy
lioness".
During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four
generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry,
the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and
Sensibility, which, like all of Jane Austen's novels except Pride
and Prejudice, was published "on commission", that is, at the
author's financial risk. When publishing on commission,
publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay
themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10%
commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author.
If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author
was responsible for them. The alternative to selling via
commission was the selling the copyright, where an author
received a one-time payment from the publisher for the
manuscript, which occurred with Pride and Prejudice.
Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable
among young aristocratic opinion-makers; the edition sold
out by mid-1813. Austen's novels were published in larger
editions than was normal for this period. The small size of the
novel-reading public and the large costs associated with hand
production (particularly the cost of handmade paper) meant
that most novels were published in editions of 500 copies or
less to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist.
Even some of the most successful titles during this period
were issued in editions of not more than 750 or 800 copies
and later reprinted if demand continued. Austen's novels
were published in larger editions, ranging from about 750
copies of Sense and Sensibility to about 2,000 copies of
Emma. It is not clear whether the decision to print more
copies than usual of Austen's novels was driven by the
publishers or the author. Since all but one of Austen's books
were originally published "on commission", the risks of
overproduction were largely hers (or Cassandra's after her
death) and publishers may have been more willing to
produce larger editions than was normal practice when their
own funds were at risk. Editions of popular works of non-
fiction were often much larger.

Conclusion

Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on

marriage to secure social standing and economic security. As
an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of
its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were
treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation
of what mattered in life". Rather than delving too deeply into
the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues
them with humor, according to critic John Bayley. He believes
that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude
that comedy "is the saving grace of life". Part of Austen's
fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she
was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel
Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice
to write "a representation of life as may excite mirth".

Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority,

allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth
Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more
foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used
comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and
gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the
goodness in life, often fusing it with "ethical sensibility",
creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, "To
appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need
to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and
ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the
harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and
vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her
sense of the good." Jane Austen said “Wisdom is better than
wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her
side”.
Jane Austen, the world renowned English author, completed
just six works during her time and yet manages to command
a legion of fans around the world. Her timeless stories have
been turned into a plethora of movies, television shows, and
modern adaptations in addition to being translated into
multiple languages to cross cultural boundaries. Today she
remains as popular as ever and is revered as much as any
literary figure in the history of the English language.

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