Summary

Jane Austen , born December 16, 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, England, and died July 18, 1817 in Winchester, Hampshire, was an English novelist and woman of letters. Her realism, biting social criticism and mastery of free indirect discourse, her distanced humor and irony have made her one of England's most widely read and loved writers.

All her life, Jane Austen lived within a close-knit family unit, belonging to the English gentry. She owed her upbringing to the encouragement to read provided not only by her brothers James and Henry, but above all by her father, who allowed her unrestricted access to his extensive library. Her family's unfailing support was essential to her development as a professional writer. Jane Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her early teens until around the age of twenty-five. During this period, she experimented with different literary forms, including the epistolary novel, which she eventually abandoned, and wrote and reworked three major novels, while beginning a fourth.

From 1811 to 1816, with the publication of Sense and Sensibility (published anonymously in 1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she enjoyed success. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey (in January 1817, she began her last novel, finally entitled Sanditon, which she was unable to complete before her death.

Jane Austen's work is, among other things, a critique of the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century, and belongs to the transition leading to literary realism in the 19th century. Jane Austen's plots, though essentially comic in nature, i.e. with a happy ending, highlight women's dependence on marriage for social status and economic security. Like Samuel Johnson, one of her major influences, she is particularly interested in moral issues.

Because of the anonymity she sought to preserve, her reputation was modest during her lifetime, with only a few favorable reviews. In the 19th century, her novels were admired only by the literary elite. However, the publication in 1869 of A Memoir of Jane Austen, written by her nephew, brought her to the attention of a wider public. She became an attractive figure, and popular interest in her works took off. Since the 1940s, Jane Austen has been widely recognized academically as a "great English writer". In the second half of the 20th century, Austen's novels were increasingly studied and analyzed from a variety of angles, including artistic, ideological and historical. Little by little, popular culture took hold of Jane Austen, and the film and TV adaptations made of her life and novels were a resounding success. It is generally accepted that Jane Austen's work belongs not only to the literary heritage of Great Britain and English-speaking countries, but also to world literature. Today, like the Brontës, she is the object of a cult, but of a different nature: Jane Austen's popularity is almost universal, and growing exponentially.

Jane Austen often wrote for her family, especially her brothers, who had graduated from Oxford University. Despite her family's high literary standards, Jane was the only one to become a published writer.

According to one of her biographers, information on Jane Austen's life is "famously scarce". Only a few letters of a personal or family nature remain (an estimated 160 letters out of a total of 3,000). His sister Cassandra, to whom most of them were addressed, burned many of them and censored those she kept. Others were destroyed by the heirs of her brother, Admiral Francis Austen.

The biographical information made available in the fifty years following his death comes almost entirely from those close to him. The Biographical Notice of the Author, written by her brother Henry as a preface to the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818, remained the only available biography of her for over fifty years; her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh's essential A Memoir of Jane Austen, first published in 1870, remained the standard reference work on Jane Austen's life for over half a century. It is in this biography that the artist's view (taken from the portrait made by Jane's sister Cassandra) appears, from which the various engravings used as portraits of the novelist are derived.

Both sources reflect the family's tendency to emphasize the "good quiet Aunt Jane" aspect. Since then, few new documents have come to light.

Family

Jane Austen's father, George Austen (1731-1805), and his wife, Cassandra (1739-1827), both belonged to the gentry. George descended from a family of woollen weavers, who gradually rose to the status of landed gentry. His wife Cassandra Austen, née Leigh, counts among her ancestors Sir Thomas Leigh (en), Lord Mayor in the time of Queen Elizabeth. From 1765 to 1801, for much of Jane's life, George Austen was rector of the Anglican parish of Steventon, as well as that of the neighboring village of Deane, a kilometer further north. The two villages are only ten kilometers apart from Basingstoke, Hampshire's largest town. From 1773 to 1796, George Austen supplemented his income by working as a farmer, and also as a tutor for three or four boys who boarded with him. The family lived in the Rectory, a two-storey house with an attic, surrounded by a barn, trees and meadows.

Jane Austen's immediate family was large: six brothers, James (1765-1819), George (1766-1838), Edward (1767-1852), Henry Thomas (1771-1850), Francis William ("Frank", 1774-1865), Charles John (1779-1852), and a sister, Cassandra Elizabeth (1773-1845), who, like Jane Austen, died unmarried. Cassandra Elizabeth was Jane's closest friend and confidante throughout her life. Among her brothers, she feels closest to Henry. Originally a banker, he became a clergyman in the Anglican Church after his bankruptcy. He was her sister's literary agent. His vast London circle included bankers, merchants, publishers, painters and actors. Thanks to her connections, Jane had the opportunity to frequent a social category normally inaccessible to a person isolated in a small rural parish at the bottom of Hampshire.

George, meanwhile, was placed in the care of a local family at an early age, because, as Jane Austen biographer Deirdre Le Faye reports, he was "mentally abnormal and prone to fits". He may also have been deaf and dumb.

Charles and Frank served in the navy, rising to the rank of admiral. Edward was adopted in 1783 by a distant cousin, Thomas Knight, whose name he took over in 1812, when he inherited his estates.

Early years and education

Jane Austen, born on December 16, 1775 at Steventon Rectory, was baptized on April 5, 1776. After a few months, her mother placed her with a neighbor, Elizabeth Littlewood, who was her nursemaid for a year or a year and a half. In 1783, in keeping with family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley, whom they followed to Southampton later that year. Both sisters contract typhus, which nearly kills Jane. They were then brought up in their parents' home until they left for boarding school in early 1785. Education at the boarding school probably included French, spelling, sewing and embroidery, dance, music and perhaps drama. But by December 1786, Jane and Cassandra had returned home, as their parents could no longer finance their boarding. Jane's education was then supplemented at home by reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry. Jane's favorite authors were the poets William Cowper (1731-1800) and especially George Crabbe (1754-1832).

It seems that George Austen gave his daughters unrestricted access to his extensive (nearly 500 books) and varied (mainly literature and history) library, tolerated some of Jane's sometimes daring literary attempts (risqué, as the English term goes), and provided his daughters with the expensive paper and materials they needed for their writing and drawing. According to Jane Austen biographer Park Honan, the Austens' home life was bathed in an "open, amused and easy intellectual atmosphere", where social and political ideas other than their own were considered and discussed. After her return from boarding school in 1786, Jane Austen "never lived outside her immediate family environment".

Private theater performances were also part of her education, and from the age of seven until she was thirteen, Jane took part in a series of plays put on by her family and close friends. These included Richard Sheridan's The Rivals, first performed in 1775, and David Garrick's Bon Ton. While the details remain unknown, it's almost certain that Jane was involved, first as a spectator and then, as she grew older, more actively. Most of these plays were comedies, which contributed to the development of her comic and satirical sense. Jane Austen's "French" cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, plays a starring role in some of these plays. Later, in Mansfield Park, Jane Austen gave the "theatricals" an importance that went far beyond mere entertainment.

Juvenilia

In all likelihood, Jane Austen began writing poems, stories and plays as early as 1787, for her own amusement and that of her family. She later made fair copies ("transcriptions au propre") of twenty-seven of these early works, in three bound notebooks now known as Juvenilia, containing writings from 1787 to 1793. Some manuscripts reveal that Jane Austen continued to work on them until around 1809-1810, and that her nephew and niece, James Edward and Anna Austen, added to them until 1814.

Among her writings is a satirical epistolary novel, Love and Freindship , in which she pokes fun at fashionable sentimental novels (Novels of sensibility). Also included is L'Histoire de l'Angleterre, a thirty-four-page manuscript accompanied by thirteen watercolor miniatures by Cassandra. It is a parody of popular historical writings, in particular Oliver Goldsmith's History of England, published in 1771. In it, for example, Jane Austen writes:

According to specialist Richard Jenkyns, Jane Austen's Juvenilia is anarchic and brimming with turbulent gaiety; he compares it to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne and 20th-century Monty Python.

Entering adulthood

As an adult, Jane Austen continued to live with her parents, devoting herself to the usual activities of a woman of her age and social status: she played the pianoforte, helped her sister and mother manage the servants, assisted the women of the family when they gave birth and helped elderly parents on their deathbed. She sends a few short letters to her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine and Jane Anna. She is particularly proud of her talents as a seamstress.

Jane Austen attended church regularly, visited her friends and neighbors and read novels, often written by herself, aloud to her family in the evenings. Relationships between neighbors often led to dancing, either impromptu during a visit, after supper, or at balls held in the meeting rooms of Basingstoke Town Hall. According to her brother Henry, "Jane loved to dance, and indeed excelled at it".

In 1793, Jane Austen began, then abandoned, a short play later entitled Sir Charles Grandison, or, The happy man: a comedy in five acts, which she completed around 1800. It was a parody of some of the school summaries of her favorite novel, Samuel Richardson's The Story of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Shortly after Love and Freindship in 1789, Jane Austen made, according to Honan, the decision "to write for money, and to devote herself to telling stories", in other words, to become a professional writer. It's a fact that, from 1793 onwards, she began to write longer, more complex works.

Between 1793 and 1795, Jane Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel generally regarded as her most ambitious early work. Lady Susan is unlike any of her other works. Claire Tomalin sees her heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and deceive her victims, whether lovers, friends or relatives. She writes:

"Told in epistolary form, this is a story as well hewn as a play, and of a cynicism of tone that equals the most scandalous comedies of the Restoration, which may have been one of the sources of its inspiration ... occupies a unique place in Jane Austen's work as a study of a grown woman whose intelligence and strength of character are superior to those of everyone whose path she crosses."

First novels

After completing Lady Susan, Jane Austen tried her hand at her first novel, Elinor and Marianne. Her sister Cassandra later recalled that it was read to the family "before 1796", and took the form of a series of letters. In the absence of the original manuscripts, it is impossible to say to what extent the original draft survived in the novel published in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.

When Jane Austen reached the age of twenty, Thomas Langlois Lefroy, the nephew of a neighboring family, came to Steventon, where he stayed from December 1795 to January 1796. Fresh from university, he was about to move to London to train as a barrister. Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen were probably introduced to each other at a neighborly get-together or at a ball. Jane's letters to Cassandra show that they spend a lot of time together.

The Lefroy family intervened and dismissed Tom at the end of January. Marriage was out of the question, as Tom and Jane were well aware: neither was wealthy, and he depended on an Irish great-uncle to finance his studies and establish himself in his profession. Tom Lefroy later returned to Hampshire, but he was carefully kept away from the Austens and Jane never saw him again.

In 1796, Jane Austen began work on a second novel, First Impressions, the future Pride and Prejudice, the first draft of which she completed in August 1797, when she was just 21. As always, she read the manuscript aloud, and it soon became "an established favorite". Her father took steps to have it published for the first time. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, a renowned London publisher, asking if he would be willing to publish "a Manuscript Novel, consisting of three volumes, about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina", with the financial risk assumed by the author. Cadell promptly returned the letter with the note: "Declined by Return of Post". It may be that Jane Austen was unaware of this paternal initiative. In any case, after completing First Impressions, she returned to Elinor and Marianne, and from November 1797 to mid-1798 reworked it extensively, abandoning the epistolary format in favor of a third-person narrative close to the final version (Sense and Sensibility).

In mid-1798, after completing the rewrite of Elinor and Marianne, Jane Austen began a third novel, provisionally entitled Susan. This is the future Northanger Abbey, a satire of the Gothic novels that had been raging since 1764 and still had a good career ahead of them. The work was completed about a year later. Early in 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to a London publisher, Benjamin Crosby, who bought it for ten pounds sterling (£10), promised rapid publication, announced that the work was "in press", and left it at that. The manuscript lay dormant with Crosby until 1816, when Jane Austen herself took over the rights.

Bath and Southampton

In December 1800, the Reverend George Austen decided without notice to quit his ministry, leave Steventon and move with his family to Bath, Somerset. While this cessation of activity and travel was a good thing for the elders, Jane Austen was distraught at the thought of abandoning the only home she had ever known. During her stay in Bath, she practically stopped writing, which says enough about her state of mind. She worked on Susan for a while, began then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but the activity of 1795-1799 seems far away. Claire Tomalin hypothesizes that this sterility is indicative of a deep depression. Park Honan, on the other hand, notes that Jane Austen never stopped writing or reworking her manuscripts throughout her working life, with the sole exception of the few months following her father's death. The question remains controversial, and Margaret Doody, for example, agrees with Tomalin.

In December 1802, Jane Austen receives her only proposal of marriage. She and her sister are visiting Alethea and Catherine Bigg, long-time friends who live near Basingstoke. Their youngest brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, having completed his studies at Oxford University, is at the house and asks for Jane's hand in marriage, which she accepts. Both Caroline Austen, the novelist's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant of this suitor, describe him as a tall, unattractive fellow. He's plain-looking, speaks little, stammers as soon as he opens his mouth, and is even aggressive in conversation. What's more, he's practically tactless. Jane, however, has known him since childhood, and the marriage offers many advantages for both herself and her family. Harris is heir to vast family estates in the area where the sisters grew up. Thus wealthy, Jane Austen could ensure a comfortable old age for her parents, give Cassandra a home of her own, and perhaps help her brothers to develop their careers. The next morning, Jane Austen realizes she has made a mistake and resumes her consent. No correspondence or diary reveals what she really thought of this proposal of marriage. Although Jane Austen never married, 200 years after her death two forged marriage certificates were discovered in the Steventon marriage register, which she had written herself, probably in her teens.

In 1814, Jane Austen wrote to Fanny Knight, one of her nieces (whom she considered almost a sister, as she wrote to Cassandra), who had asked her advice about Mr John Plumtre's marriage proposal to her:

"And now, my dear Fanny, having written in favor of this young man, I will now beseech you not to commit yourself further, and not to think of accepting him unless he really pleases you. Everything must be preferred or endured rather than married without affection."

The Watsons, a novel begun in Bath in 1804, concerns an invalid clergyman with few financial resources, and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of the lives of financially dependent women". Park Honan believes, and Claire Tomalin agrees, that Jane Austen deliberately stopped working on the book after her father's death on January 21, 1805: her own situation was too similar to that of her characters for her not to feel a certain unease.

The illness, which was soon to take Reverend Austen's life, is sudden, leaving him, as Jane reports to her brother Francis, "completely unaware of his own condition". Jane, Cassandra and their mother find themselves in a difficult situation. Edward, James, Henry and Francis Austen pledge to support them with annual payments. The four years that followed reflected this precarious situation: the three women lived most of the time in rented accommodation in Bath, then, from 1806, in Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his young wife, and visits to other branches of the family multiplied.

On April 5, 1809, some three months before the move to Chawton, Jane Austen wrote to Richard Crosby to express her anger - he still hadn't published Susan - and to offer him a new version, if necessary, for immediate publication. Crosby replied that he had not committed himself to any deadline, or even to publication, but that Jane Austen could buy back the rights to the ten pounds he had paid for, and find another publisher. Jane Austen, however, lacking the means to effect this transaction, is unable to recover her manuscript.

Chawton

Around the beginning of 1809, Edward, one of Jane Austen's brothers, offered his mother and sisters a more stable life by providing them with a large cottage in the village of Chawton. The house is part of his estate, Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved in on July 7, 1809. Life in Chawton became quieter than it had been since the arrival in Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialize with the neighboring gentry, and entertained only during family visits. Jane's niece Anna recounts their daily life: "It was a very quiet life, from our point of view, but they read a lot, and apart from domestic chores, our aunts were busy helping the poor and teaching this boy or that girl to read or write". Jane Austen wrote almost every day, but in private, and seems to have been relieved of certain constraints so that she could devote more time to her manuscripts. In this new environment, she regained the fullness of her creative powers.

Published author

During her stay in Chawton, Jane Austen managed to publish four novels, which were well received. Through her brother Henry, publisher Thomas Egerton accepted Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in October 1811. The novel received rave reviews and became fashionable in influential circles; by mid-1813, it had sold out. Jane Austen's income from the novel gave her a certain independence, both financially and psychologically. In January of that year, Egerton published Pride and Prejudice, a reworked version of First Impressions. He gave the book wide publicity, and it was an immediate success, with three favorable reviews and good sales. By October, Egerton was able to start selling a second edition. Mansfield Park was published by Egerton in May 1814. Although the critics didn't think much of the novel, Mansfield Park was very well received by the public. All copies were sold out in just six months, and Jane Austen's earnings exceeded those from each of her other works.

In November 1815, James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent's librarian, invited Jane Austen to Carlton House and told her that the Prince Regent, the future George IV, admired her novels and kept a copy in each of his residences; he then advised her to dedicate her next work, Emma, to the Regent. Austen disliked the character, but found it difficult to resist the request. She later wrote A Plan of a Novel, based on suggestions from various sources, presenting in satirical form the outline of the "perfect novel", as recommended by the librarian in question.

In mid-1815, Jane Austen left Egerton for the more renowned London publisher John Murray, who published Emma in December 1815 and, in February of the following year, a second edition of Mansfield Park. Emma sold well, but Mansfield Park was less successful, and the financial results of this double operation were very mixed. These were the last novels to appear during the author's lifetime.

Jane Austen had already begun writing a new book, The Elliots, later published as Persuasion, the first draft of which she completed in July 1816. Shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen bought the rights to Susan from Crosby. Jane, however, was forced to postpone the publication of both books due to her family's financial difficulties. Henry's bank failed in March 1816, causing him to lose all his possessions, leaving him heavily in debt, and also injuring his brothers Edward, James and Frank. Henceforth, Henry and Frank could no longer allocate to their mother and sisters the annual sum they had been paying them.

Illness and death

Early in 1816, Jane Austen's health began to fail. At first, she ignored the illness, continuing to work and participate in family activities. By the middle of the year, neither she nor those around her could doubt the seriousness of her condition, which gradually deteriorated, with flare-ups and remissions. She died in July of the following year. Most biographers rely on Dr. Vincent Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis, which attributed Jane Austen's death to Addison's disease, an adrenal insufficiency caused at the time by tuberculosis. Other authors have also suggested that Jane Austen suffered from Hodgkin's disease at the end of her life.

Jane Austen continued working almost to the end. Dissatisfied with the denouement of The Elliots, she rewrote the two concluding chapters, which she completed on August 6, 1816. In January 1817, she began a new novel, which she entitled The Brothers, a title that became Sanditon when it was first published in 1925. She completed twelve chapters before stopping writing in mid-March 1817, probably because illness prevented her from continuing. Jane speaks of her condition casually to those around her, referring to "bile" and "rheumatism", but she finds it increasingly difficult to walk and struggles to devote herself to her other activities. By mid-April, she is unable to leave her bed. In May, Henry accompanies Jane and Cassandra to Winchester for medical treatment. Jane Austen dies on July 18, 1817, at the age of 41. Through his ecclesiastical connections, Henry arranges for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by James praises her personal qualities, expresses the hope of her salvation and mentions "the extraordinary endowments of her mind", without explicitly mentioning her achievements as a writer.

Posthumous publication

After their sister's death, Cassandra and Henry Austen agreed with Murray to publish Persuasion and Northanger Abbey together in December 1817. Henry wrote a Biographical Note for the occasion, which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Claire Tomalin describes it as an affectionate and carefully written eulogy. Sales were good for a year - only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818 - then declined. Murray disposed of the remainder in 1820, and Jane Austen's novels went out of print for twelve years. In 1832, publisher Richard Bentley bought back the remaining rights and, from December 1832 or January 1833, published them in five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, he published the first complete edition. Since then, Jane Austen's novels have been constantly republished.

However, the complete text of Sanditon, his last unfinished novel, was not published until 1925, according to R. W. Chapman's version of the manuscript.

Juvenilia

Jane Austen's first influence was her family. Like all her siblings, she was encouraged by her father, George Austen, to familiarize herself with the great authors. In her father's library, she discovered the poems of Pope and Shakespeare, the essays of Addison and Johnson, the novels of Fanny Burney, Fielding, Sterne and Richardson, and the works of William Cowper. This literary apprenticeship was complemented by fatherly readings at the wake, including novels such as Francis Lathom's The Midnight Bell, which Isabella Thorpe recalls in chapter VI of Northanger Abbey. In addition to her father's decisive influence, Jane Austen had the example of her mother, Cassandra Leigh, before her: she wrote humorous poems, and excelled in conversation, with "a very lively imagination" and a marked sense of epigram.

It was also during these evening sessions that Jane Austen's art of dialogue was honed. When she read her first novels aloud, she was able to measure her style against that of authors such as Richardson and Fielding. Finally, these family gatherings give her the opportunity to exercise her sense of humor with her brothers, who, like her, are not lacking in wit. The jovial Edward, the optimistic Henry, even in the face of professional setbacks, and the more serious James, the eldest, all engage in joyous verbal exchanges that brighten up the household, with Francis and especially mischievous Charles, "our beloved little brother", boldly delivering the rebuttal.

Fanny Burney (1752-1840) shares Jane Austen's sense of the feminine picaresque and the bizarre, reveals to her the possibilities of free indirect discourse, and tackles certain "feminist" themes that Jane Austen would later take up. In Northanger Abbey, Jane pays a heartfelt tribute to her elder sister: Fanny Burney's novels Camilla, Evelina, Cecilia and The Wanderer criticize the hypocrisy of patriarchal society, as their male characters oppress the women they are supposed to protect.

Finally, Jane Austen is indebted to Fanny Burney for the title of Pride and Prejudice, taken from a sentence by Dr. Lyster at the end of Cecilia; the two novels are similar in character and plot.

Samuel Richardson had a considerable influence on Jane Austen, who had read and reread The History of Sir Charles Grandison. Certain scenes in Mansfield Park (Fanny in Portsmouth) recall the heroine of his novel Clarissa, whose anguish prefigures that of Fanny.

Paradoxically, Jane Austen satirizes Richardson's sentimentality and, at the same time, constantly refers to him. Every time she starts a new novel, she returns to Sir Charles Grandison. This is because she fully appreciates Richardson's virtues, while at the same time levelling the sharpest criticism at his faults.

Sir Charles Grandison's direct influence can be seen in seductive characters such as Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility) or Wickham (Pride and Prejudice), who recall Captain Anderson, the upstart who courts Charlotte Grandison. Mansfield Park, meanwhile, may owe its title to Mansfield-house, which appears in Sir Charles Grandison. Beyond the title, Mansfield Park's plot is reminiscent of Sir Charles Grandison's in terms of the conflict between love and religious conviction, and in terms of its heroine, abandoned at the start of the novel by the man who later chooses her.

Jane Austen's beloved Dr. Johnson inspired the stoicism and fortitude found in some of her characters, such as the Royal Navy heroes portrayed in Persuasion. What's more, this author, admired by the whole of the English intellectual elite, cannot fail to fascinate, even unconsciously, a beginner writer. As Peter L. de Rose has shown, his constantly published advice and ethics influenced Jane Austen's serene yet biting style.

In Jane Austen's writing, the curious mix of sardonic remarks interwoven with an obvious moral concern has intrigued critics such as A. C. Bradley (an eminent Shakespeare commentator), who sees Jane Austen as "a moralist cum humorist deeply influenced by Samuel Johnson".

Jane Austen shares Henry Fielding's taste for parody, as in Shamela (1741), in which Fielding, under a pseudonym, mocks his contemporary Richardson's Pamela or Rewarded Virtue. Among the authors Jane Austen targets in this way is Oliver Goldsmith (Jane Austen's parodic spirit is developed in more detail below). The novelist also borrowed certain types of English society characters from Henry Fielding. She read Tom Jones, without encountering any objections from her clergyman father, although the plot features prostitutes. It's true that Tom Jones also paints a morally advantageous portrait of a virtuous squire, godfather (who we learn at the end of the story is also an uncle) to young Tom, the hero of this picaresque novel. The squire is a recurring character in Jane Austen's novels.

Henry Fielding's influence can also be felt in certain characters imagined by Jane Austen: Mrs Jennings (Sense and Sensibility), John Thorpe (Northanger Abbey) or Persuasion's Admiral Croft, whose vulgarity, unpolished behavior and all-round character are well representative of her satirical vein. Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice, the plot developed around the character of George Wickham and his undignified behavior towards Darcy were inspired to Jane Austen by Master Blifil's malevolent acts towards the hero recounted in Tom Jones.

Jane Austen's sense of the burlesque, of offbeat humor, is characteristic of her work from Juvenilia onwards. The influence of Charlotte Lennox and her book The Female Quixotte, published in 1752 and referred to in 1808 by Jane Austen in a letter to Cassandra, can be seen here. In his Covent Garden Journal, Henry Fielding praised the novel, which enjoyed great success at the end of the 18th century, being successively translated into German (1754), French (1773) and Spanish (1808).

The influence of this feminine transposition of Cervantes' Don Quixote on Jane Austen is palpable, particularly in her Northanger Abbey, where the sense of horror and terror contrasts with the ridiculousness of her heroines' fiery emotions. Jane Austen's Isabella Thorpe is reminiscent of the heroine of Charlotte Lennox's Arabella, with her exaggerated romanticism, exaltation and propensity for fantasy; Arabella dreams of being able to kill at a glance, and of causing those who court her to suffer a thousand deaths for her sake.

There are many, for Jane Austen read widely, and throughout her life (moreover, her talents as an imitator enabled her to effortlessly appropriate the stylistic elements of this or that author. In The Short Oxford Dictionary of English Literature, Andrew Sanders wrote in 1996 that, according to her first biographer, Jane Austen was "an admirer of Dr Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse and Cowper in both". The same author reports that in her youth, she adored George Crabbe to the point of joking that, if she ever married, "she could fancy being Mrs Crabbe".

Other sources of inspiration include Ann Radcliffe and her Udolpho, if only for the parody of Northanger Abbey as the imaginative Catherine Morland; Oliver Goldsmith, author of the famous Vicar of Wakefield, a character with whom she is also familiar.

More recent authors include Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, Robert Burns (quoted in Sanditon), Maria Edgeworth (with, in particular, Belinda), or even the young William Wordsworth, who places such importance on things natural and professes, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (2nd edition, 1800), that he is interested only in plain speech and expresses himself in the language of the people, especially those of the countryside. For all that, Austen's important characters are cultured, whether men or women, and demand that the reader be too.

That said, Wordsworth, who had much disparaged Crabbe's poetry as a rival, ventured to compare it to the work of Jane Austen. Her novels, he conceded, were "an admirable copy of life", but he said he could not be interested in "productions of that kind", because, "unless the truth of nature were presented to him, unless the truth of nature were presented to him clarified, as it were, by the pervading light of imagination", "it had scarce any attraction in his eyes".

Style and narrative structure

Perhaps the first thing that strikes the reader of Jane Austen's novels is her sense of humor - which she uses to "debunk" the pretentious vanity of her characters. The light-heartedness, however, of these often unexpected witticisms, is sometimes interwoven with a more biting irony.

Each novel is peppered with quick notes, some of them with an offbeat, unconscious humor that delights the reader all the more. Thus, from the very first pages of Persuasion, Elizabeth Elliot, eldest daughter of Sir Walter Eliott, a baronet with a shaky fortune, ponders ways of coping with the family's very serious financial difficulties:

In his 1952 essay Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, Marvin Mudrick sees Jane Austen's irony as "a defense against her feelings, and a telltale sign of the narrowness and bitterness of her spinster life", a thesis somewhat undermined by the omnipresence of irony since Juvenilia, and by B. C. Southam's analysis that there is no trace of bitterness in Jane Austen's novels. C. Southam, for whom there is no trace of bitterness in Jane Austen's novels. That said, the second part of the essay shows that the ironic approach is also an instrument of discovery, through which the author invites the reader to question the meaning of what she writes and, as a result, to interpret reality and the interactions between characters more finely.

A classic example is the sentence that opens Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"; for, behind the appearance, nestles the invitation to realize that marriageable daughters seek out wealthy men, which is made clear, moreover, by the rest of the paragraph: "This truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters".

Occasionally, the humor, in the form of a witticism, becomes wicked wit, or even shocking, as can be seen in one of the letters she writes to Cassandra:

Austen's dark, somewhat unseemly humor has been seen as a defense against the harshness of the female condition (three of her sisters-in-law died in childbirth). However, if Jane Austen appears to her twenty-four nephews and nieces as good quiet Aunt Jane, she is in reality a formidable observer of the society around her, never hesitating to stigmatize the shortcomings of her contemporaries, and never disdaining to shock.

Jane Austen - like Henry Fielding and his Shamela, or Charlotte Lennox and The Female Quixotte - loves to capture the foibles of other writers, or the exaggerations of their style, which she then parodies with delight.

As early as her Juvenilia, she mocked Oliver Goldsmith's style with L'Histoire de l'Angleterre, in which she mercilessly parodies L'Histoire de l'Angleterre depuis les premiers âges jusqu'à la mort de Georges II. Love and Freindship is another example of Jane Austen's early taste for parody, in which she pokes fun at the lyrical, romantic, fairy-tale epistolary novels of the time, in which everything has a happy ending; in Jane Austen, on the other hand, everything goes wrong, as the subtitle of this little novel, "Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love", suggests.

Mature novels abandon pure parody to create their own universe. However, Northanger Abbey is, at least in part, a parody of the Gothic novel, even if it also contains aspects of Jane Austen's mature works. Jane Austen's parodic sense is expressed by forcing the line, by exaggerating everything in the Gothic novels she targets that seems ridiculous to her, such as implausibly twisted plots or particularly rigid novelistic conventions.

In a spirit quite different from that of the search for comic effect, Jane Austen uses parody, according to some feminist literary critics, to reveal how sentimental novels, like Gothic novels, distort the way women live their lives, pushing them to espouse the imaginary world they've found there. As feminist literary critics Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain in their seminal 1979 work The Madwoman in the Attic, Jane Austen mocks "romantic clichés such as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and duties, the hero's chivalrous exploits, the heroine's delicate vulnerability, the lovers' disdain for financial considerations and the cruel tactlessness of parents".

Another characteristic of Jane Austen's style is her frequent use of free indirect speech. This is a narrative form whose distinctive feature is that it does not use an introductory narrative verb ("to speak", "to say" or "to think"). As the subordinate clause containing the quoted statement is deprived of a main clause, the character's voice and that of the narrator become entangled, so that it's unclear whether the narrator or the character is speaking. What's more, since it's free of introductory parts and punctuation, this narrative mode lends fluidity and liveliness to the story. In Northanger Abbey, for example, Jane Austen makes her heroine Catherine Morland think aloud, while her wild imagination transforms the abbey into a place of dark tragedies, just like the Gothic extravaganzas she loves so much:

This narrative form, as Margaret Anne Doody reminds us, was introduced into English literature by Fanny Burney and a number of other women writers at the end of the 18th century, whose legacy Jane Austen thus picked up.

This free indirect speech, with its uninterrupted thread through the narrator's voice, may have been perceived as a form of irony, insofar as the author pretends to adhere to the character's words; on the other hand, it can also be seen as a mark of sympathy, inviting the reader to empathize. The ironic tone is evident in Northanger Abbey, where Jane Austen gives free rein to Catherine Morland's youthful imagination, but its use is more complex in the other novels. In Emma, for example, when the heroine's thoughts are reported in this way, Jane Austen intends to highlight Emma's formidable delight in manipulating those closest to her to ensure their happiness.

Armed with the premises she inherited, Jane Austen thus appears to be the first writer to have given free indirect discourse the function of representing the lived self in the moment.

If realism is the verbal transcription of perception, then Jane Austen is problematic. As Norman Page observes, her novels "conspicuous absence of words referring to physical perception, the world of shape and color and sensuous response". ("conspicuous absence of words referring to physical perception, the world of shape and colour and sensuous response"), which implies that they have no physical thickness. Janet Todd, however, writes that Jane Austen creates an illusion of realism through identification with the characters, and also because they are rounded, i.e. "endowed with thickness", with a history and a memory. This depth of character, however, is not universally accepted. Marilyn Butler, for example, denies that Jane Austen is a "realist", on the grounds that she is not concerned with the psychology of her heroines, preferring to use them polemically to criticize "sensibility". What's more, as she shies away from the sensual, the irrational, the deviations of the mind whose existence she cannot deny, she takes the decision not to depict them. William Galperin's analyses, echoed by Pierre Goubert, tend to refocus Jane Austen's realism around two notions: verisimilitude and immediacy, which make her the historian of the everyday. In his conclusion, Pierre Goubert quotes George Henry Lewes, who, despite being one of the first to understand Jane Austen's dimension, limits her realism to the rather narrow vision of a woman of her time, her condition and her social experience.

A more subtle aspect of Austen's work is her use of symbolism: everything is symbolic - events, the configuration of families, social relationships and, above all, places. As Virginia Woolf observed for the very first time in 1913, this facet of her art is particularly present in Mansfield Park. The adventure of the theatrical performance in Sir Thomas Bertram's absence is in itself a boldness felt as guilty, where the order of the places taken by the various characters during the evenings announces or confirms their still unconscious relationships. The Sotherton estate, for its part, comprises a number of enclosures, each of which defines a potential site of transgression: the house itself and the layout of its rooms, the steps, the garden, the small wood and, finally, the dangerous boundary, the famous ha-ha beyond which young people in search of love and freedom venture, crossing a locked gate and defying the prohibition of the key, as far as the oak timber knoll, the extreme boundary half a mile further on. This initial crossing of the gates prefigures the abduction (elopement) to which Maria Bertram will later consent, and through which the scandal will arrive.

Themes

At the end of the 18th century, the distractions of a well-to-do household with leisure time were few and depended on relationships with the neighborhood. For Jane Austen's heroes, as for the members of her own family, these leisure activities took place within the limits of the distance a carriage could cover in a day. So it's the distance between homes that reduces the diversity of company, especially in the countryside. Thus, the Austens are linked to a dozen close families, such as the Digweeds of Steventon, the Biggs of Manydown or the Lefroys of Ashe. Together, they organize dinners, balls, card games and hunting parties. They also get together for simple parties, with a young lady showing off her piano skills or throwing an impromptu ball.

Leisure times are also adapted to the distance between towns. In Sense and Sensibility, it takes three days to get from Barton in Devonshire to London. So it's not just a matter of spending a few days there: we stay for weeks, even months. Trips to Bath, a popular, rather worldly and somewhat "snobbish" watering hole, or to London, the big city where anything is possible, become long-term expeditions whose return depends on circumstances.

When you visit a relative living in another region, you linger for two weeks, a month or several months, depending on how you reciprocate. It is during these family visits that Jane and her sister Cassandra are most often separated, and therefore write to each other. Such are the ways of life and the distractions that form the backdrop to Jane Austen's novels.

Marriage - with the condition of women in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a constant backdrop - is the dominant and omnipresent theme of Jane Austen's novels, the outcome and goal of all encounters between young people.

As English law does not recognize women as independent subjects, they are attached by law to their husbands when they are married; they are then "covered" by their husband's economic and political rights. On the other hand, when she is not married, the father or the family manages her interests, as is customary under customary law.

In the early 19th century, a woman was valued according to her "marriageability" (Marriageability is the primary criterion of female value). Great attention was paid not only to her beauty, but also to her accomplishments - the piano, singing, drawing and watercolour painting, mastery of the French language and, occasionally, a little geography. The list of indispensable talents is discussed at Netherfield in Pride and Prejudice.

Women were so subjugated to marriage that it wasn't until 1918 that they were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections, and even then it was proposed to exclude old maids on the grounds that they had failed "to please or attract" mates.

As middle age comes early in a woman's life, she is quickly labeled an "old maid". Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, is a "faded" beauty at twenty-seven (her bloom had vanished early), and seems doomed to celibacy.

At the age of thirty-eight, Jane Austen knows she has reached the age of a respectable lady, and accommodates this in a humorous way: "(...) as I leave off being young, I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like". While Jane Austen received help from her brothers and, to a lesser extent, enjoyed the income from her novels, many of the "old maids" were less privileged, struggling to support themselves as few professions were open to them.

What's more, women can find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to passing on parental assets. Very often, clauses in wills stipulate that the family fortune will go to a male heir, perhaps a distant cousin. The daughters of the family then find themselves disinherited, or even driven out of their home on their father's death. Such provisions are implicit in several of Jane Austen's novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, where the practice of entail is explained in chapter XIII, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.

It's hardly surprising, then, that Mrs. Bennet's first, almost obsessive concern in Pride and Prejudice is to "marry well" her five daughters.

The condition of women and their social difficulties explain why critics have focused on the "feminist" side of Jane Austen's work.

Thus, Northanger Abbey, in addition to its parodic aspects, offers the reader another dimension, that of an explicit claim. Signs of this can be seen in the violent attack on The Spectator at the end of Chapter V, which stigmatizes the magazine's disdain for novels written by women, or in the description of the self-serving and unseemly way in which the heroine, Catherine Morland, is treated by General Tilney. However, Jane Austen's readers are above all looking for the pleasure of her lively, alert style; the way her heroines aspire to marriage is, in their eyes, more conservative than feminist.

Some critics, like Misty G. Anderson, go so far as to see Mansfield Park as a precursor of the lesbian novel, in view of "the remarkable way in which Mary and Fanny are drawn to each other". But if women are indeed the central characters in Jane Austen's novels, it's probably pointless to look for a concept that only entered the vocabulary in 1851, with the introduction of the word feminism in the Oxford English Dictionary, and even later in everyday language, where the word feminist didn't appear until the 1880s-1890s.

On the other hand, it's the heroines who bring the novels to life with their concerns, ideas, revolts and feelings of injustice. They are often brilliant, keenly aware of the world around them, and know how to be strong. Characters like Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) or Emma Woodhouse (Emma) militate for feminism by their very presence, so much so that a veritable "women's culture" has emerged from these books, through readers' identification with these striking personalities.

In all Jane Austen's novels, we find a moral code that prescribes not to spend more than one's income (not to live beyond one's income), to be kind to one's inferiors, not to be haughty and contemptuous, and to behave honorably. These eminently recommendable qualities are well illustrated in Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park.

George Austen recommended it to his son Francis, when he embarked on the frigate HMS Perseverance on December 23, 1788 as a Volunteer at the age of fourteen:

"(...) You are leaving so far away that you will no longer be able to consult me (...). Consequently, I think it necessary, before your departure, to give you my feelings on general subjects, which I consider of the greatest importance to you."

"(...) You can either, by a contemptuous, odious and selfish attitude, arouse disgust and aversion, or, by your affability, good humor and accommodating attitude, become an object of esteem and affection for others. (...) it shall be your duty (...) to conciliate benevolence by all honourable means at your disposal."

"(...) Keep accurate accounts of everything you receive or spend, (...) and under no circumstances allow yourself to be persuaded to risk your money on gambling."

This shows that George Austen was very concerned with the moral education of his children: Jane has learned her lesson.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Gothic novels were very popular with the public. Ann Radcliffe's Mystères d'Udolphe (1794) set the trend for dark plots involving young women confronted by mysterious characters. The story often takes place in Gothic-style castles (as in Francis Lathom's The Midnight Bell) or "tortuous" (labyrinthine) abbeys, such as Ann Radcliffe's La Forêt or l'Abbaye de Saint-Clair (1791).

This dramatized approach, as unrealistic as possible, is a far cry from Jane Austen's natural style, which she only parodied in Northanger Abbey: the old abbey inhabited by the Tilney family takes on the appearance of a gloomy mansion in the eyes of young Catherine Morland. Her friend Henry Tilney mocks her fears, mingled with a certain excitement: "Will not your mind misgive you when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber - too lofty and extensive for you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size (...)?" ("Won't your mind misgive you when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber - too lofty and extensive for you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size?

Jane Austen's masterful demonstration that she could have written a Gothic novel every bit as terrifying as those by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew "Monk" Lewis or Francis Lathom, but her aim is to underline just how much young Catherine Morland loves to scare herself: when a mysterious manuscript turns out to be no more than a forgotten laundry note, she continues, against all odds, to track down the dramas that the abbey must have harbored.

On several occasions, Jane Austen's heroes come to the defense of the novels. Such is the case in Northanger Abbey, in the voices of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney. In the long, often commented-on development at the end of chapter V, Jane Austen makes an apology for the novel in terms comparable to those later used by Margaret Oliphant.

Novels were very popular at the time, especially among women, whose education had progressed considerably during the 18th century, and who themselves contributed to this success. It is estimated that between 1692 and the end of the 18th century, the majority of novels were written by women authors. In championing the novel, Jane Austen also took up the defense of female novelists, all the more necessary as some of them did not hesitate to disparage the literary genre: thus Maria Edgeworth, when presenting her novel Belinda, refused to call it a "novel", instead calling it a "moral tale", declaring:

For the novel, in its day, lacked the aura of poetry, the noble genre par excellence. In 1882, essayist and historian Margaret Oliphant remarked that, while British culture celebrated men as the originators of the "flood of noble poetry at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was negligent of the sudden development of purely feminine genius at the same great era".

Male culture, represented at the end of the 17th century by writers such as Swift and Pope, took a dim view of the intrusion of female wits into literature. In certain conservative circles, an easy play on words was used to sully these authors by equating "published women" with "public women", i.e. prostitutes (female publication = public woman).

Jane Austen often praises the beauty of the English countryside. In addition to her own sensibility, this is no doubt a reminder of William Cowper, whose works can be found in the family library.

Chapter 9 of Sense and Sensibility, for example, is full of descriptions of the beauty of the Devon countryside around Barton Cottage, which invites you to go for a walk: "The whole country about them abounded in beautiful walks".

The charm of the English countryside is also evoked during the long autumn walk to Winthrop taken by Anne Elliot and her family in Persuasion: '(...) Her pleasure in the walk must arise (...) from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges'.

Last but not least, Pride and Prejudice features Pemberley's sumptuous castle and immense park, which Mrs Gardiner focuses on at the end of her long letter to Elizabeth Bennet.

Although this aspect is rarely mentioned in her novels, Jane Austen lived through an era torn apart by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The consequences were felt within her own family, as her cousin Eliza Hancock's first husband, Jean-François de Feuillide, was guillotined in February 1794.

His two brothers Francis and Charles served in the Royal Navy during the wars against France. They both became admirals. War enabled officers to rise rapidly in rank, at the risk of their lives, and also to amass a fortune from their prize money. These preoccupations are echoed in the patriotic accents, in praise of the Royal Navy, that conclude Persuasion :

As can be seen from her History of England, Jane Austen was conservative by nature. Her sympathies had been with the Tory party since she was a teenager, so she was far from embracing the revolutionary ideal. But she was also convinced that far-reaching changes were necessary, and proclaims this in certain passages of Mansfield Park, where we see Fanny Price taking the measure of reforming the organization of large estates. Some critics, such as Alistair Duckworth and Marilyn Butler, have noted in her work accents reminiscent of Burke, with both an opposition to the French Revolution and a concern for radical reform of land ownership and social institutions. For Jane Austen, these reforms are more concerned with the collective good than individual interest.

Review home

Published anonymously, Jane Austen's works hardly won her fame. Although they quickly became fashionable among the elite, for example with Princess Charlotte Augusta, daughter of the Prince Regent, the future George IV, they received only a handful of favorable reviews, most of them short and superficial. These cautious critics were content to emphasize the moral aspect of Jane Austen's novels. Some reactions are more perceptive: for example, Sir Walter Scott's anonymous leaflet defends the cause of the novel as a genre and praises Jane Austen's realism. Similarly, in 1821, Richard Whately compared Jane Austen to Homer and Shakespeare, emphasizing the dramatic qualities of her narrative style. Walter Scott and Whately thus set the tone for Austen criticism right up to the end of the 19th century.

However, as Jane Austen's novels do not fit the British criteria of Romantic literature (represented more by Charlotte and Emily Brontë), and of the Victorian era, according to which "a powerful emotion must be authenticated by an insignificant manifestation of color and sound in the writing", 19th-century British critics generally preferred the works of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot. Although Jane Austen was republished in Britain from the 1830s and continued to sell, she was not among the public's favorite authors.

But she remained appreciated by the literary elite, who saw this interest as proof of their own good taste. George Henry Lewes, himself an influential author and critic, expressed his admiration in a series of enthusiastic articles published in the 1840s and 1850s. He called her "the greatest artist who ever wrote", a "Shakespeare in prose". This idea continued into the second half of the 19th century with novelist Henry James, who referred to Jane Austen several times, even going so far as to compare her to Cervantes and Henry Fielding for what he called their "fine painters of life".

Dissenting voices were also heard, such as Charlotte Brontë, who found it too limited, or the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning too, who, while undertaking her Aurora Leigh, wrote of Jane:

These two passionate women couldn't be satisfied with "a little piece of chiselled ivory".

In 1869, the publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen by the novelist's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, brought the portrait of "dear Aunt Jane", a respectable spinster, to a wider public. This led to renewed interest in the work, with the first popular editions available in 1883, soon followed by illustrated versions and collections. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, writer and critic, described the public craze of the 1880s as "Austenolatry". At the very beginning of the 1900s, certain members of the literary elite, who defined themselves as Janeites, reacted against this fervor: according to them, the people could not understand the deeper meaning of the work to which only they had access. Henry James spoke of "a beguiled infatuation" that exceeded the intrinsic scope and interest of its object.

In any case, during the last quarter of the 19th century, British critics gave Jane Austen a great deal of attention. After the publication of The Nephew's Memoirs, her work attracted more attention in two years than in the previous fifty.

The novelist's fame in the French-speaking world came later. The first French critic to pay her attention was Philarète Chasles (1837-1873), who completely disparaged her as a writer, devoting just two sentences to her in an 1842 essay on the influence of Sir Walter Scott, calling her a dull writer and an imitator who wrote nothing of substance. Apart from Chasles, Jane Austen was almost totally ignored in France until 1878, when the French critic Léon Boucher published his essay Le Roman classique en Angleterre, in which he described Jane Austen as a genius: the first time this epithet was used in France to describe Jane Austen.

Two series of works paved the road leading Jane Austen's work to academic recognition. The first milestone was a 1911 essay by Shakespeare scholar Andrew Cecil Bradley of Oxford University, "generally regarded as the starting point for serious academic research". Bradley categorized Jane Austen's novels as "early" and "late", a methodology still used today. Meanwhile, in France, the first academic work devoted to the novelist was Paul and Kate Rague's Jane Austen, published in 1914 with the support of Émile Legouis and André Koszul, professors at the Faculté des lettres in Paris, in which the authors endeavored to demonstrate that Jane Austen deserved to be taken seriously by French critics and readers. In the same year, Léonie Villard defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Lyon, which was subsequently published as Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Œuvres. These two simultaneous works marked the beginning of French academic studies devoted to the novelist.

The second milestone was the complete edition compiled by R. W. Chapman in 1923, the first scholarly edition, and also the first of its kind devoted to an English novelist, so that Chapman served as a reference for all subsequent editions. This was followed in 1939 by Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art, which gave Austenian scholarship its due. This groundbreaking study includes an analysis of the novelist's readings and the impact they may have had on her work, as well as an in-depth examination of her style and "narrative art".

The 1940s saw a reappraisal of her work, which was approached by scholars from new angles, such as that of subversion. D. W. Harding, in an essay that opened up a new line of thought, presents her as a satirist "more astringent than delicate", a social critic seeking "unobtrusive spiritual survival" through her works. Finally, the value judgments of F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt, who place Jane Austen among the greatest writers of English-language fiction, definitively establish the novelist's pre-eminence among academics. All agreed that "she combines the qualities of inwardness and irony, realism and satire of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and proves superior to both". After the Second World War, other studies were carried out, drawing on various critical approaches, such as feminism, or, perhaps more debatably, post-colonialism.

This post-colonial reading has focused mainly on Mansfield Park, following Edward Saïd's analysis in his 1994 essay, Jane Austen and Empire, which focuses on the role played by Sir Thomas's estates in the West Indies. On this account, he is seen as a planter living off slavery (although, according to other critics, Mansfield Park and its lands were enough to provide him with the bulk of his income). Jane Austen's silence on the subject would seem to reflect an awareness of the shameful nature of this exploitation. This hypothesis is corroborated by a very brief exchange between Fanny and Edmund:

"Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night? - I did - and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of further. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of further.")."

Be that as it may, the gap continues to widen between the popular infatuation, particularly among Janeites (unconditional admirers of Jane Austen), based on the immediate charm that the work exudes, and the austere academic analyses that continue to explore new avenues with varying fortunes.

Posterity of the work

Soon, novelists who were contemporaries of Jane Austen but lived longer drew inspiration from her work. Susan Ferrier (1782-1854), a Scottish novelist, explored comic themes, though lacking Jane's "thrifty, intelligent urbanity". The same is true of John Craft (1779-1839), also from Scotland, whose writing style is reminiscent of Jane Austen's, being "theoretical histories limited necessarily to the events of a circumscribed locality".

But it was not until the 20th century that works inspired by Jane Austen began to flourish, starting with Georgette Heyer's novels and then, with the advent of cinema and above all television, a whole paraliterary industry of rewrites, sequels and even proximate transpositions of highly variable quality, some of which are gradually being translated into French.

Jane Austen is the narrator of the video game Saints Row IV. She also makes a brief appearance at the end of the video game. The story's protagonist and antagonist both seem to have a certain admiration for her.

Since the introduction of a new banknote on September 14, 2017, a portrait of Jane Austen has appeared on £10 denominations in place of that of Charles Darwin. Apart from the Queen, the novelist is the only woman to appear on a British note. A quotation from Pride and Prejudice accompanies her portrait: "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! The chosen quotation is not without its critics, as it is placed in the mouth of Caroline Bingley, a hypocritical character who clearly doesn't mean what she says.

Key events in Jane Austen's life and work (including some major events in English history at the time):

Sources

1. Jane Austen
2. Jane Austen
3. Irene Collins estime que, lorsque George Austen prend ses fonctions de recteur en 1764, Steventon ne compte pas plus de trente familles[24]
4. Deirdre Le Faye et Irene Collins ajoutent que les Austen suivent cette coutume pour tous leurs enfants.
5. Irene Collins pense que « Jane Austen utilise quelques-uns des manuels dont s'étaient servi les garçons sous le préceptorat de son père[41] ».
6. Pour les conventions sociales de la gentry en général, voir Irene Collins 1994, p. 105.
7. El original no está firmado, pero la familia creía que había sido hecho por Cassandra y permaneció en la familia con el boceto firmado por ella hasta 1920. El boceto original, según los familiares que conocían bien a Jane Austen, no se parecía mucho. (Kirkham, M (2005). «Portraits». En Todd, J, ed. Jane Austen in Context (en inglés). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 68-72. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. OCLC 1158882576. )
8. Tenenbaum, Tamara (8 de marzo de 2018). «20 escritoras que tenemos que seguir leyendo». Infobae.com.
9. «Jane Austen and Religion». victorianweb.org. Consultado em 23 de dezembro de 2022
10. Opiniões de Jane Austen sobre as infidelidades do príncipe e sua esposa [1]
11. Biography of Jane Austen (1818), escrita por seu irmão Henry Austen. John Murray. Londres. Reimpressa em 1833.
12. Elsemarie Maletzke: Jane Austen, S. 161.
13. Elsemarie Maletzke: Jane Austen, S. 281, 294 f.