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University of Mosul
College of Arts / Department of English
Second Year / Second Semester
Evening Class


Jane Austen
Life and works
Prepared by:
Afrah Kalid Rasheed


1441 A.H.


CONTENTS

  • Brief Biography


  • Education and Influences


  • Early Works: 1787-1798


  • Bath and Southampton Years: 1801-1809


  • Mature Novels and Publishing Success: 1809-1817


  • Final Months: 1817


  • Jane Austen's Novels











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Jane Austen






Jane Austen (1775-1817), one of England’s foremost novelists,
was never publicly acknowledged as a writer during her lifetime.
Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, the seventh child of a country clergyman and his wife, George and Cassandra Austen. Her closest friend was her only sister, Cassandra, almost three years her senior.
Education and Influences
Jane Austen was primarily educated at home, benefiting from her father’s extensive library and the schoolroom atmosphere created by Mr. Austen’s live-in pupils.
Though she lived a quiet life, she had unusual access to the greater world, primarily through her brothers. Francis (Frank) and Charles, officers in the Royal Navy, served on ships around the world and saw action in the Napoleonic Wars.
Henry, who eventually became a clergyman like his father and his brother James, was an officer in the militia and later a banker. Austen visited Henry in London, where she attended the theater, art exhibitions, and social events and also corrected proofs of her novels.
Her brother Edward was adopted by wealthy cousins, the Knights, becoming their heir and later taking their name. On extended visits to Godmersham, Edward’s estate in Kent, Austen and her sister took part in the privileged life of the landed gentry, which is reflected in all her fiction.
Early Works: 1787-1798

As a child Austen began writing comic stories, now referred to as the Juvenilia. Her first mature work, composed when she was about 19, was a novella, Lady Susan, written in epistolary form (as a series of letters). This early fiction was preserved by her family but was not published until long after her death.
In her early twenties Austen wrote the novels that later became Sense and Sensibility (first called “Elinor and Marianne”) and Pride and Prejudice (originally “First Impressions”). Her father sent a letter offering the manuscript of “First Impressions” to a publisher soon after it was finished in 1797, but his offer was rejected by return post.
Austen continued writing, revising “Elinor and Marianne” and completing a novel called “Susan” (later to become Northanger Abbey). In 1803 Austen sold “Susan” for £10 to a publisher, who promised early publication, but the manuscript languished in his archives until it was repurchased a year before Austen’s death for the price the publisher had paid her.
Bath and Southampton Years: 1801-1809

When Austen was 25 years old, her father retired, and she and Cassandra moved with their parents to Bath, residing first at 4 Sydney Place.
During the five years she lived in Bath (1801-1806), Austen began one novel, The Watsons, which she never completed. After Mr. Austen’s death, Austen’s brothers contributed funds to assist their sisters and widowed mother.
Mrs. Austen and her daughters set up housekeeping with their close friend Martha Lloyd. Together they moved to Southampton in 1806 and economized by sharing a house with Frank and his family.
Mature Novels and Publishing Success: 1809-1817

In 1809 Edward provided the women a comfortable cottage in the village of Chawton, near his Hampshire manor house. This was the beginning of Austen’s most productive period. In 1811, at the age of 35, Austen published Sense and Sensibility, which identified the author as “a Lady.” Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Emma in 1815.
The title page of each book referred to one or two of Austen’s earlier novels—capitalizing on her growing reputation—but did not provide her name.
Austen began writing the novel that would be called Persuasion in 1815 and finished it the following year, by which time, however, her health was beginning to fail. The probable cause of her illness was Addison’s Disease. In 1816 Henry Austen repurchased the rights to “Susan,” which Austen revised and renamed “Catherine.”
Final Months: 1817

During a brief period of strength early in 1817, Austen began the fragment later called Sanditon, but by March she was too ill to work. On April 27, 1817, she wrote her will, naming Cassandra as her heir. In May she and Cassandra moved to 8 College Street in Winchester to be near her doctor. Austen died in the early hours of July 18, 1817, and a few days later was buried in Winchester Cathedral. She was 41 years old. Interestingly, her gravestone, which is visited by hundreds of admirers each year, does not even mention that she was an author.
Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published together in December 1817 with a “Biographical Notice” written by Henry, in which Jane Austen was, for the first time in one of her novels, identified as the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma.
Jane Austen's Novels

  • Sense and Sensibility tells the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters. Marianne is the heroine of “sensibility”—i.e., of openness and enthusiasm. She becomes infatuated with the attractive John Willoughby, who seems to be a romantic lover but is in reality an unscrupulous fortune hunter. He deserts her for an heiress, leaving her to learn a dose of “sense” in a wholly unromantic marriage with a staid and settled bachelor, Colonel Brandon, who is 20 years her senior. By contrast, Marianne’s older sister, Elinor, is the guiding light of “sense,” or prudence and discretion, whose constancy toward her lover, Edward Ferrars, is rewarded by her marriage to him after some distressing vicissitudes.
  • Pride and Prejudice describes the clash between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich and aristocratic landowner. Although Austen shows them intrigued by each other, she reverses the convention of “first impressions”: “pride” of rank and fortune and “prejudice” against the inferiority of the Bennet family hold Darcy aloof, while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the “pride” of self-respect and by “prejudice” against Darcy’s snobbery. Ultimately, they come together in love and self-understanding. The intelligent and high-spirited Elizabeth was Jane Austen’s own favourite among all her heroines and is one of the most engaging in English literature.
  • Northanger Abbey combines a satire on conventional novels of polite society with one on Gothic tales of terror. Catherine Morland, the unspoiled daughter of a country parson, is the innocent abroad who gains worldly wisdom, first in the fashionable society of Bath and then at Northanger Abbey itself, where she learns not to interpret the world through her reading of Gothic thrillers. Her mentor and guide is the self-assured and gently ironic Henry Tilney, her husband-to-be.

In the three novels of Jane Austen’s maturity, the literary satire, though still present, is more subdued and is subordinated to the comedy of character and society.

  • Mansfield Park :In its tone and discussion of religion and religious duty, Mansfield Park is the most serious of Austen’s novels. The heroine, Fanny Price, is a self-effacing and unregarded cousin cared for by the Bertram family in their country house. Fanny emerges as a true heroine whose moral strength eventually wins her complete acceptance in the Bertram family and marriage to Edmund Bertram himself, after that family’s disastrous involvement with the meretricious and loose-living Crawfords.
  • Of all Austen’s novels, Emma is the most consistently comic in tone. It centres on Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman who indulges herself with meddlesome and unsuccessful attempts at matchmaking among her friends and neighbours. After a series of humiliating errors, a chastened Emma finds her destiny in marriage to the mature and protective George Knightley, a neighbouring squire who had been her mentor and friend.
  • Persuasion tells the story of a second chance, the reawakening of love between Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whom seven years earlier she had been persuaded not to marry. Now Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars with prize money and the social acceptability of naval rank. He is an eligible suitor acceptable to Anne’s snobbish father and his circle, and Anne discovers the continuing strength of her love for him.



RERERENCES
-رواية ايما / ترجمة لوسي يعقوب / مكتبة الانجلو المصرية / القاهرة / 7-8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen-
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jane-Austen-
https://www.biography.com/writer/jane-austen-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/histori...ten_jane.shtml-
-https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1265.Jane_Austen
https://www.bl.uk/people/jane-austen-
https://www.janeausten.org-
http://jasna.org/austen/-
https://www.almrsal.com/post/429633.-