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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: AUD-BAI |
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AUSTEN, JANE (1775-1817) , English novelist, was born on the 16th of December 1775 at the parsonage of Steventon, in Hampshire , a village
rector . She was the youngest of seven children. Her mother was Cassandra Leigh, niece of Theophilus Leigh, a dry humorist, and for fifty years master of Balliol, Oxford. The life of no woman of genius could have been more uneventful than Miss Austen's. She did not marry, and she never left home except on short visits, chiefly to Bath. Her first sixteen years were spent in the rectory at Steventon, where she began early to trifle with her pen, always jestingly, for family entertainment. In 18o1 the Austens moved to Bath, where Mr Austen died in -8os, leaving only Mrs Austen, Jane and her sister Cassandra, to whom she was always deeply attached, to keep up the homehis sons were out in the world, the two in the navy, Francis William and Charles, subsequently rising to admiral's rank. In 18o5 the Austen ladies moved to Southampton, and in 1809 to Chawton, near Alton, in Hampshire , and there Jane Austen remained till 1817, the year of her death, which occurred at Winchester, on July 18th, as a memorial window in the cathedral testifies.During her placid life Miss Austen never allowed her literarywork to interfere with her domestic duties : sewing much and admirably, keeping house, writing many letters and reading aloud. Though, however, her days were quiet and her area circumscribed, she saw enough of middle-class provincial society to find a basis on which her dramatic and humorous faculties might build, and such was her power of searching observation and her sympathetic imagination that there are-not in English fiction more faithful representations of the life she knew than we possess in her novels. She had no predecessors in this genre. Miss Austen's " little bit (two inches wide) of ivory " on which she worked " with so fine a brush "her own phraseswas her own invention. Her best-known, if not her best work, Pride
Pride
Although Pride and Prejudice is the novel which in the mind of the public is most intimately associated with Miss Austen's name, both Mansfield Park and Emma are finer achievementsat once riper and richer and more elaborate. But the fact that Pride and Prejudice is more single-minded, that the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and D'Arcy is not only of the book but is the book (whereas the love story of Emma and Mr Knightley and Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram have parallel streams), has given Pride and Prejudice its popularity above the others among readers who are more interested by the course of romance than by the exposition of character. Entirely satisfactory as is Pride and Prejudice so far as it goes, it is, however, thin beside the niceness of analysis of motives in Emma and the wonderful management of two housefuls of young lovers that is exhibited in Mansfield Park. It has been generally agreed by the best critics that Miss Austen has never been approached in her own domain. No one indeed has attempted any close rivalry. No other novelist has so concerned herself or himself with the trivial daily comedy of small provincial family life, disdaining equally the assistance offered by passion, crime and religion. Whatever Miss Austen may have thought privately of these favourite ingredients of fiction, she disregarded all alike when she took her pen in hand. Her interest
Recognition came to Miss Austen slowly. It was not until quite recent
standing
while Mrs Radcliffe and " Monk " Lewis, whose supernatural fancies` Northanger Abbey was written in part to ridicule, are no longer anything but names. Although, however, she has become only lately a household word, Miss Austen had always her panegyrists among the best intellectssuch as Coleridge, Tennyson, Macaulay, Scott, Sydney Smith, Disraeli and Archbishop Whately, the last of whom may be said to have been her discoverer. Macaulay, whose adoration of Miss Austen's genius was almost idolatrous, considered Mansfield Park her greatest feat; but many critics give the palm to Emma. Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times. Scott's testimony is often quoted: " That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like any one going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me."Many monographs on Miss Austen have been written, in addition to the authorized Life by her nephew J. E. Austen Leigh in 187o, and the collection of her Letters edited by Lord Brabourne in 1884. The chief
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