Jane Austen

1. Jane Austen Thalia Rios CP English 12 Pd. 7

2. Biography. • Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775. Her father was Reverend George Austen, and her mother was Cassandra Austen. She was the seventh child out of eight, but she was only the second daughter. Reverend George Austen taught children outside of his family to make some money, this was his second job. When Austen was only eight years old she was sent off with her sister to a boarding school. After she came back hoe from the boarding school she learned from her father and her brothers, they taught her what they could. Since her father was a Reverend he had access to books, papers, and other supplies they needed. In 1787, Jane Austen began writing in her notebooks; she wrote poetry and stories that contained some subjects of her interest. In 1789 she wrote the comedy Love and Friendship, and she began writing more comedies. After she finished the comedy Elinor and Marianne she read it aloud to her family, they were amused by her writing. Jane Austen finished the first draft for Pride and Prejudice. At the age of 27 she and her family moved to the town of Bath, this was due to her parent’s retirement. Her brother Henry took a copy of Sense and Sensibility to one of London’s publishers; the publisher liked the novel and published it in 1811, by 1813 they had sold out all of the first edition novels. In January of 1813 they had published Pride and Prejudice. About four years later on July 18, 1817 Jane Austen passed away leaving her brother and sister to get her other books published, she is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

3. Pride and Prejudice • In the novel Pride and Prejudice a wealthy man named Charles Bingley rented the Netherfield Park the village is surprised, one of the families that is really shocked is the Bennet family. The Bennets have five daughters none of which are married; this was a great opportunity for one of them to get married. When Charles Bingley meets Jane, one of the Bennet daughters, he spends his time dancing with her. Mr. Bingley’s close friend, Mr. Darcy later starts falling for Elizabeth, the second Bennet daughter. When Jane becomes ill Elizabeth has to hike through fields, and finally arrives to NetherField. When Miss Bingley, Charles’ sister, notices that Mr. Darcy is paying more attention to Elizabeth than he is to her she gets upset.

4. Sense and Sensibility. • In the novel Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Henry Dashwood dies and leaves everything to his son, and leaves nothing to his second wife and their three daughters. His three daughters did not have a good place to live and were very poor. Living in these conditions they are forced to move to Barton Park with their distant relatives. In this new town Elinor and Marianne meet some new people, two of these new people are Colonel Brandon and Mr. John Willoughby. Mr. Willoughby rescues Marianne when she gets hurt running in the rain, and from that point on they manage to build a relationship. Willoughby then tells Marianne that he has to leave to London because business is calling.

5. Emma. • Emma, published in 1815, has been described as a "mystery story without a murder". The eponymous heroine is the charming (but perhaps too clever for her own good) Emma Woodhouse, who manages to deceive herself in a number of ways (including as to who is really the object of her own affections), even though she (and the reader) are often in possession of evidence pointing toward the truth. Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, she overcomes self-delusion during the course of her novel. The book describes a year in the life of the village of Highbury and its vicinity, portraying many of the various inhabitants.

6. Manfield Park. • This novel, originally published in 1814, is the first of Jane Austen's novels not to be a revised version of one of her pre-1800 writings. Mansfield Park has sometimes been considered atypical of Jane Austen, as being solemn and moralistic, especially when contrasted with the immediately preceding Pride and Prejudice and the immediately following Emma. Poor Fanny Price is brought up at Mansfield Park with her rich uncle and aunt, where only her cousin Edmund helps her with the difficulties she suffers from the rest of the family, and from her own fearfulness and timidity. When the sophisticated Crawfords (Henry and Mary), visit the Mansfield neighbourhood, the moral sense of each marriageable member of the Mansfield family is tested in various ways, but Fanny emerges more or less unscathed. The well-ordered (if somewhat vacuous) house at Mansfield Park, and its country setting, play an important role in the novel, and are contrasted with the squalour of Fanny's own birth family's home at Portsmouth, and with the decadence of London

7. Northanger Abbey • This playful short novel is the one which most resembles Jane Austen's Juvenilia. It is the story of the unsophisticated and sincere Catherine Morland on her first trip away from home, for a stay in Bath. There she meets the entertaining Henry Tilney; later, on a visit to his family's house (the "Northanger Abbey" of the title) she learns to distinguish between the highly charged calamities of Gothic fiction and the realities of ordinary life (which can also be distressing in their way). Like Jane Austen's Love and Freindship, this book makes fun of the conventions of many late 18th century literary works, with their highly wrought and unnatural emotions; some of this humor derives from the contrast between Catherine Morland and the conventional heroines of novels of the day (for an idea of the latter, see the Plan of a Novel).

8. Persuasion • This relatively short novel, her last, was written in the last few years of Jane Austen's life, and published only after her death in 1817 (though she described it, in a letter of March 13 1816, as "a something ready for publication", she probably would have revised it further, if she had not already been ill with her eventually fatal disease by the time she stopped working on it). It involves an older heroine than any of her other novels do (Anne Elliot is 27), and is also the only novel whose events are explicitly dated to a specific year (1814-1815). Eight years before the novel begins, Anne Elliot (whom Jane Austen described in one of her letters as a "heroine [who] is almost too good for me") had been persuaded by an older friend of the family, whom she respects, to give up her engagement to the then-poor Captain Wentworth. Like Mansfield Park, this novel has a number of characters who are in the navy (two of Jane Austen's brothers were sailors), and several warm-hearted naval families are attractively depicted; these contrast favorably with Anne's own family, in which she is overlooked by her vain and rank-proud Baronet father and her cold and selfish elder sister. In its autumnal mood, this novel is more serious in tone than most of Jane Austen's other works, and perhaps is the most conventionally "romantic" of them (and thus the one which has given rise to the most speculation about her own affairs of the heart -- for example, by Kipling); however, there is still plenty of Jane Austen irony. Persuasion also contains more description of background and natural beauty than the previous novels. In her admiration for the seaside town of Lyme and dislike of Bath, Anne Elliot reflects her creator's preferences.

9. Love and Friendship • Along with a satirical "History of England", Love and Freindship (usually cited in Jane Austen's original spelling) is the most famous of her Juvenilia. This is an exuberant parody (in epistolary form) of the cult of sensibility, which she later criticized in a more serious way in her novel Sense and Sensibility. For the main characters in Love and Freindship, including the narrator Laura, violent and overt emotion substitutes for morality and common sense. Characters who have this "sensibility“ fall into each other's arms weeping the first time they ever meet, and on suffering any misfortune are too preoccupied with indulging their emotions to take any effective action ("Ah! what could we do but what we did!... It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself -- We fainted alternately on a sofa"). They use their fine feelings as the excuse for any misdeeds, and despise characters without such feelings: