Jane Austen was born in
Steventon, England, in 1775, where she lived
for the first twenty-five years of her life. Her father, George
Austen, was the rector of the local parish and taught her largely
at home. She began to write while in her teens and completed the
original manuscript of Pride and Prejudice, titled First
Impressions, between 1796 and 1797.
A publisher rejected the manuscript, and it was not until 1809 that
Austen began the revisions that would bring it to its final form. Pride
and Prejudice was published in January 1813,
two years after Sense and Sensibility, her
first novel, and it achieved a popularity that has endured to this
day. Austen published four more novels: Mansfield Park,
Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. The
last two were published in 1818, a year after
her death.
During Austen’s life, however, only her immediate family
knew of her authorship of these novels. At one point, she wrote
behind a door that creaked when visitors approached; this warning
allowed her to hide manuscripts before anyone could enter. Though
publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial
reputation, it also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time
when English society associated a female’s entrance into the public
sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity. Additionally, Austen
may have sought anonymity because of the more general atmosphere
of repression pervading her era. As the Napoleonic Wars (1800–1815) threatened
the safety of monarchies throughout Europe, government censorship
of literature proliferated.
The social milieu of Austen’s Regency England was particularly stratified,
and class divisions were rooted in family connections and wealth.
In her work, Austen is often critical of the assumptions and prejudices
of upper-class England. She distinguishes between internal merit
(goodness of person) and external merit (rank and possessions).
Though she frequently satirizes snobs, she also pokes fun at the
poor breeding and misbehavior of those lower on the social scale.
Nevertheless, Austen was in many ways a realist, and the England
she depicts is one in which social mobility is limited and class-consciousness
is strong.
Socially regimented ideas of appropriate behavior for
each gender factored into Austen’s work as well. While social advancement for
young men lay in the military, church, or law, the chief method
of self-improvement for women was the acquisition of wealth. Women could
only accomplish this goal through successful marriage, which explains
the ubiquity of matrimony as a goal and topic of conversation in
Austen’s writing. Though young women of Austen’s day had more freedom
to choose their husbands than in the early eighteenth century, practical
considerations continued to limit their options.
Even so, critics often accuse Austen of portraying a limited world.
As a clergyman’s daughter, Austen would have done parish work and
was certainly aware of the poor around her. However, she wrote about
her own world, not theirs. The critiques she makes of class structure
seem to include only the middle class and upper class; the lower
classes, if they appear at all, are generally servants who seem
perfectly pleased with their lot. This lack of interest in the lives of
the poor may be a failure on Austen’s part, but it should be understood
as a failure shared by almost all of English society at the time.
In general, Austen occupies a curious position between
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her favorite writer, whom
she often quotes in her novels, was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great
model of eighteenth-century classicism and reason. Her plots, which
often feature characters forging their respective ways through an
established and rigid social hierarchy, bear similarities to such
works of Johnson’s contemporaries as Pamela, written by Samuel Richardson.
Austen’s novels also display an ambiguity about emotion and an appreciation
for intelligence and natural beauty that aligns them with Romanticism.
In their awareness of the conditions of modernity and city life
and the consequences for family structure and individual characters,
they prefigure much Victorian literature (as does her usage of such
elements as frequent formal social gatherings, sketchy characters,
and scandal).
