Reception History of Jane Austen - Background

Background

Jane Austen lived her entire life as part of a large and close-knit family on the lower fringes of the English gentry. Her family's steadfast support was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer. Austen read draft versions of all of her novels to her family, receiving feedback and encouragement, and it was her father who sent out her first publication bid. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried and then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. With the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer.

Novel-writing was a suspect occupation for women in the early 19th century, because it imperiled their social reputation by bringing them publicity, viewed as unfeminine. Therefore, like many other female writers, Austen published anonymously. Eventually, though, her novels' authorship became an open secret among the aristocracy. During one of her visits to London, the Prince Regent invited her, through his librarian, James Stanier Clarke, to view his library at Carlton House; his librarian mentioned that the Regent admired her novels and that "if Miss Austen had any other Novel forthcoming, she was quite at liberty to dedicate it to the Prince". Austen, who disapproved of the prince's extravagant lifestyle, did not want to follow this suggestion, but her friends convinced her otherwise: in short order, Emma was dedicated to him. Austen turned down the librarian's further hint to write a historical romance in honour of the prince's daughter's marriage.

In the last year of her life, Austen revised Northanger Abbey (1817), wrote Persuasion (1817), and began another novel, eventually titled Sanditon, which was left unfinished at her death. Austen did not have time to see Northanger Abbey or Persuasion through the press, but her family published them as one volume after her death and her brother Henry included a "Biographical Notice of the Author". This short biography sowed the seeds for the myth of Austen as a quiet, retiring aunt who wrote during her spare time: "Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives ... o much did she shrink from notoriety, that no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen ... in public she turned away from any allusion to the character of an authoress." However, this description is in direct contrast to the excitement Austen shows in her letters regarding publication and profit: Austen was a professional writer.

Austen's works are noted for their realism, biting social commentary, and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque and irony. They critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. As Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain, Austen makes fun of "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents". Austen's plots, though comic, highlight the way women of the gentry depended on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Like the writings of Samuel Johnson, a strong influence on her, her works are fundamentally concerned with moral issues.