Who was Jane Austen?

Jane Austen, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, was born at Steventon. She was educated at home; her father was a man of good taste in the choice of reading material, and Jane’s education was conducted on sound lines. Her life was unexciting, being little more than a series of pilgrimages to different places of residence, including the fashionable resort of Bath (1801). On the death of the rector, his wife and two daughters moved to the neighborhood of Southampton, where the majority of Jane Austen’s novels were written. Her first published works were issued anonymously, and she died in middle age, before her merits had received anything like adequate recognition. The chronology of Jane Austen’s works is not easy to follow, for her works were not published in their order of composition. Her first novel was Pride and Prejudice (1796-97, published 1813). In it, as in all her works, we have middle-class people pursuing the common round. The heroine is a girl of spirit, but she has no extraordinary qualities; the pride and prejudice of rank and wealth are gently but pleasingly titillated, as if they are being subjected to an electric current of carefully selected intensity. The style is smooth and unobtrusive, but covers a delicate pricking of irony that is agreeable and masterly in its quiet way. Nothing quite like it had appeared before in the novel. In unobtrusive and dexterous art, the book is considered to be her masterpiece.

Sense and Sensibility (1797-98, published 1811) was her second novel, and it followed the same general lines as its predecessor. It was followed by Northanger Abbey (1798, published posthumously 1818). The book begins as a burlesque of the Radcliffian horror novel, which was then all the rage. The heroine, after a visit to Bath, is invited to an abbey, where she imagines romantic possibilities, but is in the end ludicrously undeceived. The incidents of the novel are commonplace and the characters flatly average. Yet the treatment is deft and touched with the finest needle-point of satiric observations.

Between 1798 and 1811 there was a pause in her writing, but then followed in quick succession her other three great novels, Mansfield Park (1811-13, published 1814), Emma (1815, published 1816), and Persuasion (1815-16, published 1818). The novels of this latter group are of the same type as the earlier ones; if there is any more developed it is seen in the still more inflexible avoidance of any thing that is unusual or startling. Jane Austen’s novels are all much the same, yet subtly and artistically different.

Her skillfully constructed plots are severely unromantic. Her first work, beginning as a burlesque of the horrible in fiction, finishes by being an excellent example of her ideal novel. As her acts develops, even the slight casualties of common life—such an incident, for example, as the elopement that appears in Pride and Prejudice—become rarer; with the result that the later novels, such as Emma, are the pictures of everyday existence. Life in her novels is governed by an easy decorum, and moments of fierce passion, or even deep emotion, never occur. Only the highest art can make such plots attractive, and Jane Austen’s does go. Her characters are developed with minuteness and accuracy. They are ordinary people, but are convincingly alive. She is fond of introducing clergymen, all of whom strike the reader as being exactly like clergymen, though each has his own individual characteristics. She has many characters of the first class, like the servile Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, the garrulous Miss Bates in Emma, and the selfish and vulgar John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. Her characters are not type, but individuals. Her method of portrayal is based upon acute observation and a quiet but incisive irony. Her male characters have a certain softness of temper, but her female characters are almost unexceptionable in perfection of finish.

Her place in the history of fiction is remarkable. Her qualities are of a kind that is slow to be recognized, for there is nothing loud or garish to catch the casual glance. The taste for this kind of fiction has to be acquired, but once it is acquired it remains strong. Jane Austen has won her way to a foremost place, and she will surely keep it. We add a short extract to illustrate her clear and careful style, her skill in handling conversation, and the quiet irony of her method.

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