Jane austen

JANE AUSTEN

Life and works:

Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Hampshire. He father was the rector of the village. She was mostly educated at home. Jane began writing prose and verse at an early age. She lived in the beloved countryside marked. In 1811 she publishes Sense and Sensibility, then Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park. Jane Austen died in 1817.

The novels' setting and characters:

Chronologically she belong to the romantic period, but her realism place her in line with the tradition of the 18^th century. Jane Austen's novels described scenes as three of four families in a country village. Her novel are set in the provincial world of Southern England which she knew from her own experience. Main characters belong to rural middle class, landed gentry and country clergy and they are very precisely described. They are characterized by the age, income, marital situation and prospect and social position. Her characters are lively round characters and show the author's fine psychological insight. With irony, wit and keen she explores human emotion and behaviour. This was the world which characterized England before the industrial Revolution. Jane Austen was an acute observer, she described her small provincial world with precision of a miniaturist. Her characters reveal themselves very largely through dialogue, which is only apparently the ordinary conversation of everyday life. Jane Austen is careful in the selection of an idiom suited to the person who is speaking.

The theme of love: Sense and Sensibility:

In her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, two sister, Elinor and Marianne, lead a country life. The only disturbing element is love, not passionate or tragic love, but the polite exchanges between the two sexes. She rejects a purely romantic and sentimental view of love.

The theme of marriage: Pride and Prejudice:

In Pride and Prejudice describes the small world of a few families living in a country village, engaged in their routine of visits, balls, walks and gossip. Jane Austen want to satirise another side of love: the desperate search for a husband, at all costs. The first chapter is centred on the description of Mrs Bennet's interest in the arrival of Mr Bingley. He is an excellent prospective husband for one of her five daughters.

The novels' plots:

All Jane Austen's novels centre on the experience of a young woman who, through a series of errors and delusion, develops in her understanding of herself and of other people. All the books end with the young woman's happy marriage.

Dialogue and irony:

Austen's descriptions of life depend on dialogue and irony. It does not illustrate a moral. She uses an omniscient third-person narrator. Her irony is always gentle, expressed in nicely balanced and acute observation. Jane Austen smiles gently at human frailties.

Unromantic quality of her work:

Jane Austen's insistence on morality, her interest in society and its values, and the didactic strain in her art, are all qualities very different from the qualities of most Romantic art. She admired the Augustan classics.