Austen, Jane -Life and Works

Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born in 1775 and belonged to a middle class family. She received a conventional education. Her whole family was compliant to the social rules and conservative. She never got married though she was very close to her family, especially to her sister Cassandra. As she was a woman and social class division was a very important issue at the time, she published all of her work anonymously as a way of earning money.

Main themes of her works:

She constantly describes the social background, showing the class division
She criticizes and makes fun of the prejudices and mean behavior of the English upper class and those who wanted to climb it
She analyses and describes in a few effective words people’s personalities
She shows true relationships and true feelings
Many of her heroines struggle with the conflict between their feelings and the need to conform to the social conventions. They adopt an appropriate behavior which should show balanced and controlled emotions.
She rejected the romantic and passionate idea of love. Her idea of love was based on true feelings which we can develop step by step. In her stories true love defeats class boundaries and social prejudices.
Marriage is the main topic of her stories because it was also the only way women could acquire wealth. It was a social convention of the time.
Among the main features of her works there is always gossip, flirtations, seductions and adulteries.

Style

We can understand the characters’ feelings through the description of their behaviors, especially thanks to dialogue. The characters reveal themselves through their own words. She often uses omniscient narrator and uses irony.

Critics

Her lack of interest in the lives of the poor class is considered a failure in her novel. She usually describes an environment isolated by the real problems, describing only fictional situations where most of the time the main characters are people belonging to the upper classes, like in Pride and Prejudice.

Pride and prejudice

Pride and prejudice is her main work and it was published in 1813. It is a novel of manner as it describes the upper/middle-class society, there are balls, teas, marriage and complications of love and friendship.
The main characters are Mr and Mrs Bennet and their five daughters (Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Lydia and Kitty). A wealthy gentleman, Mr Darcy, moves into the neighborhood and falls in love with Elizabeth, who actually cultivates a dislike towards him as she finds him arrogant. Meanwhile her sister Jane falls in love with Darcy’s friend, Mr Bingley.
Over time Elizabeth discovers Darcy’s true character: honorable, kind and generous, especially when he helps the Bennet’s family during a scandal involving her younger sibling.
Eventually Darcy proposed again and this time Elizabeth accepts, realizing she was wrong in her judgements. The novel ends with both couples happily married.

Why Pride and Prejudice?

Elizabeth accuses Darcy of pride. Darcy accuses Elizabeth of prejudice.