Jane Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire in southern England, where her father was a minister. She was the sixth child in a family of seven children. The family was very close, and Jane had a particular closeness to her sister Cassandra. Although she attended boarding school for a short while, she was mostly educated at home. Both she and Cassandra were attractive and attended country parties; neither of them married, although Jane had several proposals.
Jane Austen began writing at a young age. Pride and Prejudice, her most popular novel, was the first to be written, although not the first published. The novel was originally given the title First Impression and was completed in 1797.
However, it was not accepted for publication until 1813 and was then changed to Pride and Prejudice. As a result, Sense and Sensibility was published first, in 1811. Her other four novels, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion were all published between 1814 and 1818.
She also wrote six minor works and one unfinished novel. Because she wanted to avoid attention, most of her work was not published under her name. Though publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a female’s entrance into the public sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity.
Social concerns in Austen’s writing
The social milieu of Austen’s Regency England was particularly stratified, and class divisions were rooted in family connections and wealth. In her work, Austen is often critical of the assumptions and prejudices of upper-class England.
She distinguishes between internal merit (goodness of person) and external merit (rank and possessions). Though she frequently satirizes snobs, she also pokes fun at the poor breeding and misbehaviour of those lower on the social scale. Nevertheless, Austen was in many ways a realist, and the England she depicts is one in which social mobility is limited and class-consciousness is strong.
Socially regimented ideas of appropriate behavior for each gender factored into Austen’s work as well. While social advancement for young men lay in the military, church, or law, the chief method of self-improvement for women was the acquisition of wealth. Women could only accomplish this goal through successful marriage, which explains the ubiquity of matrimony as a goal and topic of conversation in Austen’s writing. Though young women of Austen’s day had more freedom to choose their husbands than in the early eighteenth century, practical considerations continued to limit their options.
About Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is an 1813 romantic novel by Jane Austen. It charts the emotional development of the protagonist Elizabeth Bennet, who learns the error of making hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between the superficial and the essential. The comedy of the writing lies in the depiction of manners, education, marriage and money during the Regency era in Britain.
The novel revolves around the importance of marrying for love, not simply for money, despite the social pressures to make a good wealthy match.
Pride and Prejudice has long fascinated readers, consistently appearing near the top of lists of "most-loved book among literary scholars and the general public. It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature, with over 20 million copies sold and paved the way for many archetypes that abound in modern literature.
Quick facts about Pride and Prejudice
Some background to the author and issues being put forth in her novels:
댓글