2023年4月浙江自考英美文学选读复习笔记：Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in a country clergyman's family on 16 December 1775, in the parish of Steventon. She was brought up in an intelligent but restricted environment. Her father was a rector and a scholar with a good library. She was educated at home with her sister. Through a wide reading of books available in her father's library, Jane acquired a thorough knowledge of eighteenth-century English literature, including the moral philosophy of Dr. Johnson, the poetry of W. Cowper, as well as the novels by Richardson and Fielding. She lived a quiet, retired and, in public terms, uneventful life, though she did move to several places like Bath, Southampton and Chawton. And her closest companion was her elder sister Cassandra, who, like her, never married. Austen began as a child to write novels for her family entertainment. Her works were later published anonymously due to the judice against women writers then. She died in Winchester.

In her lifelong career, Jane Austen wrote altogether six complete novels, which can be spanided into two distinct periods. She wrote her first three novels in the period of 1795 to 1798, but it took her more than 15 years to find a publisher. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), tells a story about two sisters and their love affairs; Pride and Prejudice (1813), the most popular of her novels, deals with the five Bennet sisters and their search for suitable husbands; and Northanger Abbey (1818) satirizes those popular Gothic romances of the late 18th century. Austen's second period of productivity began in 1811 after the publication of Sense and Sensibility. All her last three novels deal with the romantic entanglements of their strongly characterized heroines. Mansfield Park (1814) sents tile antithesis of worldliness and unworldliness; Emma (1815) gives the thought over self-deceptive vanity; and Persuasion (1818) contrasts the true love with the prudential calculations. Several incomplete works were published long after Austen's death. These include The Watsons (1923), Fragment of a Novel (1925), and Plan of a Novel (1926).

Generally speaking, Jane Austen was a writer of the 18th-century, though she lived mainly in the nineteenth century. She holds the ideals of the landlord class in politics, religion and moral principles; and her works show clearly her firm belief in the dominance of reason over passion, the sense of responsibility, good manners and clear-sighted judgment over the Romantic tendencies of emotion and inspaniduality. As a realistic writer, she considers it her duty to exss in her works a discriminated and serious criticism of life, and to expose the follies and illusions of mankind. She shows contemptuous feelings towards snobbery, stupidity, worldliness and vulgarity through subtle satire and irony. And in style, she is a neoclassicism advocator, upholding those traditional ideas of order, reason, proportion and gracefulness ill novel writing.

Austen's main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance. It is her conviction that a man's relationship to his wife and children is at least as important a part of his life as his concerns about his belief and career. It reveals his moral quality more accurately and truthfully. If one wants to know about a man's talent, one should see him at work, but if one wants to know about his nature and temper, one should see him at home. Austen shows a human being not at moments of crisis, but in the most trivial incidents of everyday life. It does not mean that this is less fundamental in the study of human nature and life. For life is made up of small things, and human nature reveals itself in them as fully as in big ones. A picnic in the woods shows up selfishness, kindness, vanity or sincerity just as much as a fight in a battlefield.

As for her interest in the study of human beings in their relationships with other people in daily life, Jane Austen is particularly  occupied with the relationship between men and women in love Stories of love and marriage provide the major themes in all her novels, in which female characters are always playing an active part. In their pursuit of a marriage, they are usually categorized into three types according to their different attitudes: those who would marry for material wealth and social position, those who would marry just for beauty and passion, and those who would marry for true love with a consideration of the partner's personal merit as well as his economical and social status. In another word, Jane Austen tries to say that it is wrong to marry just for money or for beauty, but it is also wrong to marry without it.

As a novelist Jane Austen writes within a very narrow sphere. The subject matter, the character range, the social setting, and plots are all restricted to the provincial life of the late 18th-century England, concerning three or four landed gentry families with their daily routine life: relationships with members of their own family and with their friends, dancing parties, tea parties, picnics, and gossips. In her novels, there is little reflection on the events that stirred the whole Europe at the time, no thrilling adventures, no abstract ideas, no romantic reveries, and even no death scenes. Everything in her novel results in an observation of a quiet, uneventful and contented life of the English country. Here lie her very weak points as well as strong points. Such narrowness apparently comes from the writer's own limited experience and knowledge; yet, by writing within the small area of her experience and by never stepping beyond the limits of her knowledge, it allows the writer to have a close study of characters and a detailed description of recurring situations so that she can portray them with absolute accuracy and sureness. It is no exaggeration to say that within her limited sphere, Jane Austen is unequaled.

Pride and Prejudice, originally drafted as "First Imssions” in 1796, is the most delightful of Jane Austen's works. The  tells of a major concern of the novel: pride and judice. If to form good relationships is our main task in life, we must first have good judgment. Our first imssions, according to Jane Austen, are usually wrong, as is shown here by those of Elizabeth. In the process of judging others, Elizabeth finds out something about herself: her blindness, partiality, judice and absurdity. In time she discovers her own shortcomings. On the other hand, Darcy too learns about other people and himself. In the end false pride is humbled and judice dissolved.

The structure of the novel is exquisitely deft, the characterization in the highest degree memorable, while the irony has a radiant shrewdness unmatched elsewhere. At the heart of the novelist's exploration of the marriage, property and intrigue lies the exhilarating suspense of the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, and Jane Austen's delicate probing of the values of the gentry. The moments of high comedy in the novel are always related to deeper issues. Elizabeth's rejection of the odious Mr. Collins suggests her in dependence and self-esteem, but when Collins is accepted by her friend Charlotte Lucas, we see the reality of marriage as a necessary step if a woman is to avoid the wretchedness of aging spinsterhood.  Conversely, in the elopement of Lydia and Wickham, we are shown the dangers of feckless relationships unsupported by money. The comic: characters in Pride and Prejudice are: Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins and that monstrous snob Lady Catherine de Burgh, who make us laugh even as they parody erroneous views of marriage and class.

The works of Jane Austen, at once delightful and profound, are among the sume achievements of English literature. With trenchant observation and in meticulous detail, she sents the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English. Her characteristic theme is that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. Faults of character displayed by tile people of her novels are corrected when, through tribulation, lessons are learned. Even the most minor characters are vividly particularized in Austen's lucid style. All these show a mind of the shrewdest intelligence adapting the available traditions and deepening the resources of art with consummate craftsmanship. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior, Jane Austen has brought the English novel, as an art of form, to its maturity, and she has been regarded by many critics as one of the greatest of all novelists.