Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sense against sensibility; her first published novel
Literature · Novelists
Jane Austen
1775–1817 · English
Regency novel of manners; realism
Jane Austen, a Hampshire clergyman's daughter, wrote six major novels of courtship, money and moral judgement among the English gentry. Published anonymously in her lifetime, works such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma perfected free indirect style and ironic comedy, and she is now among the most widely read English novelists.
How to spot them
- ▸Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy of Pemberley; Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh
- ▸Emma Woodhouse and Mr Knightley at Highbury; the picnic on Box Hill
- ▸Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth; Lyme Regis and Bath
- ▸Steventon rectory, Chawton cottage, Winchester Cathedral; published 'By a Lady'
- ▸Face of the Bank of England £10 note from 2017
Key works
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Elizabeth Bennet overcomes her prejudice against the proud Mr Darcy; originally titled First Impressions
Mansfield Park (1814)
Poor relation Fanny Price at the Bertram estate, whose wealth derives from Antigua
Emma (1815)
Meddling matchmaker Emma Woodhouse learns humility; dedicated to the Prince Regent
Northanger Abbey (1817 (dated 1818))
Gothic-novel-loving Catherine Morland in Bath; published posthumously
Persuasion (1817 (dated 1818))
Anne Elliot is reunited with Captain Wentworth eight years after breaking their engagement
Key ideas
- Free indirect discourse: narration that slips into a character's thoughts while keeping ironic distance
- Marriage, inheritance (the entail) and money as the economic backbone of genteel life
- Her own image of her art as a 'little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory' worked with a fine brush
Quick-fire facts
- •Pride and Prejudice opens: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'
- •Emma opens: 'Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich'
- •Born at Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of the Rev. George Austen
- •Lived from 1809 at Chawton, Hampshire; the cottage is now Jane Austen's House museum
- •Died in Winchester in 1817 and is buried in Winchester Cathedral
- •Her brother Henry revealed her name in a 'Biographical Notice' in the posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
- •Unfinished works include Sanditon and The Watsons; Lady Susan is an epistolary novella
- •Walter Scott praised her work in a review of Emma in the Quarterly Review (1816)
- •Pride and Prejudice's Bennet sisters are Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Jane Austen
- Claire Tomalin — Jane Austen: A Life