Jane Austen

Jane Austen is probably the world’s finest author... Certainly in my opinion, the greatest author in English literature.
She was writing from her girlhood, and as she died quite young, only aged 42…she only produced six novels.  She also wrote a lot of juvenilia, mostly comic short stories and 2 Epistolary Novels “Lady Susan” and “Love and Freindship”.  (Lady Susan has recently been filmed with the title Love and Friendship – inexplicable but then the film was pretty poor).
She grew up in rural England, in the late Georgian age, as the daughter of a Church of England clergyman, and one of a large family.  Her mother, Cassandra Leigh, was connected to the aristocracy; her father was genteel but far from rich.  Her family lived comfortably while he was working as a clergyman, but the 3 women of the family, Mrs Austen, Cassandra and Jane, were not well off when he had died.   Her heroines were usually daughters of country gentry, whose fathers had moderate sized estates, but she herself found herself more similar to Miss Bates, living in rented rooms on a small income.   However, she had a brother Edward, who had married well and had inherited his cousin’s estate.  In time, he was able to give his mother and sisters a cottage, Chawton, where Jane lived in the last years of her life and was able to settle down to steady writing.
She wrote the 3 novels of her maturity in Chawton and then became seriously ill, probably with Addison’s disease, a form of Tuberculosis.  She went to live in the city of Winchester, to have better medical attention and died there in 1817.
She also worked on 2 partial novels -one known as “The Watsons” which she started in the last years of her father’s life but only wrote a few chapters...Another one was “Sanditon” which she started to write on her deathbed.    It was clearly meant to be a satire on professional invalids who spend their time in watering places looking for health and trying new doctors and treatments.  Even when she herself was very ill, she could laugh and joke about something that might have been a sensitive subject.
Austen was a young girl when the English novel was developing.  She read the earlier works of authors such as Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson... and enjoyed them but she had her own ideas on how to write and she did not produce lengthy epistolary works such as Clarissa or Pamela.  She did produce epistolary novels at first, but turned 2 of them into narrated works, Sense and Sensibility (which began life as Elinor and Marianne) and Pride and Prejudice, originally called First Impressions.  Her novels were short, compared with the older writers.  She also read huge numbers of lighter works, mostly churned out by women authors trying to make a living... including Fanny Burney.  These circulating library novels were generally rather foolish, but Jane enjoyed them, and learned from them what to do and what not to do as a writer.
 Although she did not have a classical education, like the male authors, she instinctively understood that a novel was about people.  She knew that in some ways women, who spent a lot of time looking after or socialising with people, could be better observers of human nature and foibles.   So she didn’t pepper her works with long long chapters, or semi essays on this or that, or classics references.  She wrote about people and their ordinary lives, at least the ordinary lives of upper class country gentry.  She didn’t usually write about elopements or duels or melodrama.  She had done this in her juvenilia, but usually in a jocose spirit.  There was joking about duels, and “sensibility fits” and drunkenness and elopements.  
She referred to herself as an unlearned female - but in fact she had plenty of confidence in her own abilities, as a novelist and knew that she had gifts that were better for a writer than classical learning.
She was a very serious Christian and old fashioned in her beliefs.  But she was a Georgian woman, and not a Victorian so she was a lot earthier, while remaining within the bounds of propriety, than many later writers.
I hope to write some more blogs discussing her individual novels.