Jane Austen - Who is she?
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Here's a little info abt this writer of romantic comedies that inspired loads of hollywood movies... keke
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Jane Austen
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, near Basingstoke. She was the seventh of eight children born to Reverend George Austen, vicar of Steventon, and his wife Cassandra.
Jane was educated at home, where her father lodged and tutored boys. The Austen house was filled with books, and Jane was encouraged to read and write. Her major childhood enjoyment was writing and performing plays and charades with her elder sister Cassandra.
She poured herself into these writing projects with such enthusiasm that she had completed her first novel, Love and Friendship, at the age of just 14.
The pleasant countryside life of Steventon gave Jane the material for her novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, all written (but not yet published) in her early twenties.
In 1801 however, George Austen resigned his living in Steventon abruptly, and took his wife and two daughters to Bath. Jane disliked town life intensely, and missed her Hampshire home and friends. Her personal life suffered setbacks during this period, also; she fell in love, but her suitor died. Then she accepted a marriage offer from wealthy Harris Bigg-Wither, only to renounce the engagement the next morning.
When George Austen died suddenly in 1805, the family moved again, this time to Southampton, where they stayed with Jane's brother Frank. Jane wrote little or nothing during this period of her life. In 1809 Jane's brother Edward gave them a permanent home at Chawton, in Jane's beloved Hampshire countryside.
It was at Chawton that Jane Austen found the space and time to return to her writing. She revised and published Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), followed by Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). She also revised Northanger Abbey and finished Persuasion, but these were not published until 1818.
By that time Jane Austen was dead, a victim of a long illness, believed by many historians to have been tubercular kidney disease. In her final years the disease worsened to the point that she moved to Winchester to be close to her doctor. It was at Winchester that Jane Austen died in the arms of her beloved sister Cassandra, on July 18, 1817, aged only 41. She is buried at Winchester Cathedral.
After her death, Jane's final two works, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published. These were the first books published under her own name; all of the novels published during Austen's lifetime were simply described as being "By a Lady". -
Early Adulthood at Steventon & Bath
Jane Austen enjoyed social events, and her early letters tell of dances and parties she attended in Hampshire, and also of visits to London, Bath, Southampton etc., where she attended plays and such. There is a famous statement by one Mrs. Mitford that Jane was the "the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers" (however, Mrs. Mitford seems to have had a personal jealousy against Jane Austen, and it is hard to reconcile this description with the Jane Austen who wrote The Three Sisters before she was eighteen).
There is little solid evidence of any serious courtships with men. In 1795-6, she had a mutual flirtation with Thomas Lefroy (an Irish relative of Jane Austen's close older friend Mrs. Anne Lefroy). On January 14th and 15th 1796, when she was 20, she wrote (somewhat sarcastically), in a letter to Cassandra:
"Tell Mary that I make over Mr. Heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit in future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I do not care sixpence. Assure her also, as a last and indisputable proof of Warren's indifference to me, that he actually drew that gentleman's picture for me, and delivered it to me without a sigh.
Friday. -- At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea."
However, it was always known that he couldn't afford to marry Jane. A year later, Mrs. Lefroy tried to fix Jane Austen up with the Rev. Samuel Blackall, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but Jane wasn't very interested.
In late 1800 her father, who was nearly 70, suddenly decided to retire to Bath, and the family moved there the next year. During the years in Bath, the family went to the sea-side every summer, and it was while on one of those holidays that Jane Austen's most mysterious romantic incident occurred. All that is known is what Cassandra told various nieces, years after Jane Austen's death, and nothing was written down until years after that. While the family were staying somewhere on the coast (probably in south Devonshire, west of Lyme), Jane Austen met a young man who seemed to Cassandra to have quite fallen in love with Jane; Cassandra later spoke highly of him, and thought he would have been a successful suitor. According to Caroline "They parted -- but he made it plain he should seek them out again"; however, shortly afterwards they instead heard of his death! There is no evidence as to how seriously this disappointment affected Jane Austen, but a number of people have wondered whether or not Jane Austen's 1817 novel Persuasion might not reflect this experience to some degree, with life transmuted into art; Jane Austen would have been 27 (the age of Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion) during 1802-1803, and a crucial scene in Persuasion takes place in Lyme.
A more clearly-known incident occurred on December 2nd. 1802, when Jane Austen and Cassandra were staying with the Bigg family at Manydown, near Steventon. Harris Bigg-Wither, who was six years younger than herself, proposed to Jane, and she accepted, though she did not love him. However, the next day she thought better of it, and she and Cassandra showed up unexpectedly at Steventon, insisting they be taken out of the neighbourhood to Bath the next day. This was socially embarrassing, but her heart does not seem to have been seriously affected -- Mr. Bigg-Withers, though prosperous, was "big and awkward".
Notoriously, none of Jane Austen's letters to Cassandra from June 1801 to August 1804, in which she probably would have alluded to these incidents, have been preserved. In the end, Jane Austen (like Cassandra), never married.
In 1803 Jane Austen actually sold Northanger Abbey (then titled Susan) to a publisher, for the far-from-magnificent sum of £10; however, the publisher chose not to publish it. It was probably toward the end of the Bath years that Jane Austen began The Watsons, but this novel was abandoned in fragmentary form.
In January 1805 her father died. As would have been the case for the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice if Mr. Bennet had died, the income due to the remaining family was considerably reduced -- since most of Mr. Austen's income had come from clerical "livings" which lapsed with his death. So they were largely dependent on support from the Austen brothers, summing to a total of about £450 yearly. Later in 1805, Martha Lloyd (sister of James Austen's wife) came to live with Mrs. Austen, Cassandra, and Jane, after her own mother had died. -
Maturity in Southampton and Chawton
In 1806 they moved from Bath, first to Clifton, and then, in autumn 1806, to Southampton. Two years later, Jane remembered (in a letter to Cassandra) with "what happy feelings of Escape!" she had left Bath. Southampton was conveniently near to the navy base of Portsmouth and the naval brothers Frank and Charles.
In 1809 Jane Austen, her mother, sister Cassandra, and Martha Lloyd moved to Chawton, near Alton and Winchester, where her brother Edward provided a small house on one of his estates. This was in Hampshire, not far from her childhood home of Steventon. Before leaving Southampton, she corresponded with the dilatory publisher to whom she had sold Susan (i.e. Northanger Abbey), but without receiving any satisfaction.
She resumed her literary activities soon after returning into Hampshire, and revised Sense and Sensibility, which was accepted in late 1810 or early 1811 by a publisher, for publication at her own risk. It appeared anonymously ("By a Lady") in October 1811, and at first only her immediate family knew of her authorship. There were at least two fairly favorable reviews, and the first edition eventually turned a profit of £140 for her.
Encouraged by this success, Jane Austen turned to revising First Impressions, a.k.a. Pride and Prejudice. She sold it in November 1812, and her "own darling child" (as she called it in a letter) was published in late January 1813. She had already started work on Mansfield Park by 1812, and worked on it during 1813. It was during 1813 that knowledge of her authorship started to spread outside her family. Since she had sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice outright for £110 (presumably in order to receive a convenient payment up front, rather than having to wait for the profits on sales to trickle in), she did not receive anything more when a second edition was published later in 1813. A second edition of Sense and Sensibility was also published in October 1813. In May 1814, Mansfield Park appeared, and was sold out in six months; she had already started work on Emma. Her brother Henry, who then conveniently lived in London, often acted as Jane Austen's go-between with publishers, and on several occasions she stayed with him in London to revise proof-sheets. In October 1813, one of the Prince Regent's physicians was brought in to treat an illness that Henry was suffering from; it was through this connection that Jane Austen was brought into contact with Mr. Clarke.
At Steventon she and Cassandra had had a private "dressing room" next to their bedroom which she used to write her Juvenilia and early versions of her first three novels in relative privacy. At Chawton, she didn't have any such study, and James Edward tells the story of the famous creaking door, which Jane Austen requested not be fixed, since it gave her warning of any approaching visitors, so that she could hide her manuscript before they came into the room.
In addition to her literary work, she often visited her brothers and their families, and other relatives and friends, and they sometimes came to Southampton or Chawton. She had a reputation for being able to keep young children entertained, and was also attached to her oldest nieces Fanny and Anna.
In December 1815 Emma appeared, dedicated to the Prince Regent. A second edition of Mansfield Park appeared in February 1816, but was not a sales success; her losses on the reprint of Mansfield Park ate up most of her initial profits on Emma.
She had started on Persuasion in August 1815, and finished it in August 1816 -- although during 1816 she was becoming increasingly unwell. In early 1816 her brother Henry's business went bankrupt; Edward lost £20,000.
In early 1817 she started work on another novel, Sanditon, but had to give it up in March. On April 27th she made her will (leaving almost everything to Cassandra), and on May 24 she was moved to Winchester for medical treatment. She died there on Friday, July 18th 1817, aged 41. It was not known then what had caused her death, but it seems likely that it was Addison's disease. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral on July 24th 1817. -
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Nah, not a JA fan but like what Azar Nafisi wrote of Pride and Prejudice:
"All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue...It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy". -
hehehe... rather.. i like to think that all tensions are created through dialogue OR the lack of it.... silence communicates too...Originally posted by D13:Nah, not a JA fan but like what Azar Nafisi wrote of Pride and Prejudice:
"All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue...It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy".
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Lack of dialogue is the main cause of divorce!Originally posted by KittynMeow:hehehe... rather.. i like to think that all tensions are created through dialogue OR the lack of it.... silence communicates too...
Help Stop Separation; Support Pillow Talk -
X2.Originally posted by D13:Lack of dialogue is the main cause of divorce!
Help Stop Separation; Support Pillow Talk 