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2. Bed canopy. JANE AUSTEN 1775-1817
Although nowadays her portrait adorns coffee mugs and T-shirts, and journalists, making much of the movie adaptations of her novels, like to imagine her as the center of attention at Hollywood parties, Jane Austen spent her short, secluded life away from the spotlight. Other members of her large family?she was one of eight children born to an Anglican clergyman and his wife?appear to have lived more in the world and closer to this turbulent period's great events than she did. Two brothers fought as naval officers in the Napoleonic War; another became the banker to the flashy London set of the prince regent; her cousin Eliza, born in India, wed a captain in the French army who perished by the guillotine. Austen, however, spent most of her life in Hampshire, the same rural area of southern England in which she was born. Her formal education was limited to a short time at boarding school. Otherwise she and her beloved sister Cassandra had to scramble, like most girls of their class, into what education they could while at home and amidst their father's books. As neither Austen daughter married, home was where these two remained the whole of their adult lives.
Jane Austen turned down a proposal of marriage in 1802, possibly intuiting how difficult it would be to combine authorship with life as a wife, mother, and gentry hostess. She had started writing at the age of twelve, for her family's amusement and her own, and in 1797 began sending work to publishers in London. At that stage they were for the most part unreceptive. In 1803 one paid .10 for the copyright of the novel we know as Northanger Abbey, but then declined to publish it, so that Austen had at last, after tangled negotiations, to buy it back. Finally she published Sense and Sensibility (1811) at her own expense, then Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814). Next?by this time under the prestigious auspices of John Murray, who was also Byron's publisher?came Emma (1816) and, posthumously, after Austen's death at forty-one, Persuasion and a revised version of Northanger Abbey (both 1818). The Austen name was never publicly associated with any of these books, whose discreet title pages merely identified 'a lady' as the author (though, as was also the case with Scott's Waverley novels, success made Austen's authorship an open secret). The modesty of that signature, however, is belied by the assurance of Austen's narrative voice, the confidence with which (to adapt the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice) it subjects 'truths universally acknowledged' to witty critical scrutiny.
The six novels are all, in Austen's words, 'pictures of domestic life in country villages.' The world they depict might seem provincial and insular. For the most part the working classes are absent or present only as silent servants; the soldiers and sailors who were protecting England from Napoleon are presented mainly as welcome additions to a ball. Yet the novels also document with striking detail how, within those country villages, the boundaries that had formerly defined the category of 'the gentleman' were becoming permeable under the influence of the changes wrought by revolution and war, and how competition for social status was becoming that much fiercer. Through their heroines, readers can see, as well, how harshly the hard facts of economic life bore down on gentlewomen during this period when a lady's security
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depended on her making a good marriage. The conundrum at the center of the fiction is whether such a marriage can be compatible with the independence of mind and moral integrity that Austen, like her heroines, cherishes.
Austen also wrote so as to explore what the novel form could be and do. Along with the reviewers of the time, she criticized the form, but unlike them, she did so to perfect it. With striking flexibility the new narrative voice that she introduced into novel writing shifts back and forth between a romantic point of view and an irony that reminds us of romance's limits?that reminds us that romance features its own sort of provincialism. At the same time Austen also distanced the novel form from the didactic agenda cultivated by her many contemporaries who were convinced that the only respectable fiction was the antiromance that weaned its readers of their romantic expectations. Her delight in mocking their preachy fictions is not only evident in the parodies that she wrote in the 1790s (including Love and Friendship, a forerunner of George Eliot's 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists') but is a feature of her mature novels, which as a rule conclude in ways that deviate quite flagrantly from the patterns of rewards and punishment a moralist might prefer. 'I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern,' the narrator of Northanger Abbey declares in a parting shot, and in characteristic epigrammatic style, 'whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.' '[Pictures of perfection,' Austen wrote in a letter, 'make me sick and wicked.'
Austen's example is so central to what the novel as a form has become that it can be difficult from our present-day vantage point to recognize the iconoclasm in her depictions of the undervalued business of everyday life. It can be hard to see how much her originality?her creation of characters who are both ordinary and unforgettable, her accounts of how they change?challenged her contemporaries' expectations about novels' plots, setting, and characterization. Her dissent from those expectations is palpable, however, in a 'Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters,' the satire Austen wrote after Emma, and which assembles the various 'hints' she had received from well-wishers about what she should write next. The immediate occasion for the 'Plan' was the series of letters Austen received from the Reverend James Stanier Clarke, librarian to the prince regent, who having conveyed to her the prince's wish that Emma should be dedicated to him, continued the correspondence so as to suggest topics that Austen should engage for the next novel? in particular, a historical romance about the royal house of Saxe Cobourg. Austen in reply affirmed the comic spirit of all her works: 'I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter.'
Love and Friendship This work, an anarchic parody written when the author was fourteen, puts front and center Austen's gifts for ironic assassination and her sharp-eyed sense of the preachiness not simply of her period's moralists but more particularly of her period's rebels against orthodox morality. In this miniaturized novel in letters, Austen constructs a world whose inhabitants are absurdly faithful to codes of conduct they extract from their readings of novels in letters. The protagonists of Love and Friendship are energetic students of the cliches of fashionable sentimentalism. They adore Nature, like many poets favoring the romantic Scottish Highlands and picturesque Wales; they know that free spirits, true radicals, should elevate the dictates of the heart over the head. The young Austen calls attention to the messages about gender roles embedded in novel writers' celebrations of the strong feelings that make heroines swoon. She shares Wollstonecraft's impatience with how, as the latter put it in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (see p. 170), the culture makes women slaves to their emotions?'blown about by every momentary gust of feeling.' This
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work is usually classified among Austen's juvenilia, but it has the worldliness and bravado we expect from a much older author. Our text modernizes the irregular spelling and, to a lesser extent, the punctuation of the manuscript, which Austen titled 'Love and Freindship.'
Love and Friendship A Novel in a Series of Letters
'Deceived in Friendship & Betrayed in Love'
