Jane Austen: A Political Author of her Time?

Jane Austen

---

The British government as well as the aristocracy and the landed gentry were deeply alarmed by the spread of revolutionary ideas and in order to stern revolutionary potential the government enforced that radical political leaders could be arrested without trial, the distribution of political pamphlets was forbidden, reformist societies eliminated and many reformists were driven into exile. Although the British ruling class managed to suppress a revolution as it had occurred in France they could not circumvent some political reforms that should change the political climate in England forever, like e.

Their duties usually merely comprised the upbringing of the children since most middle class families employed servants, who carried out most of the household tasks. If the task of educating the children was taken over by a governess, the only duty left for women was to be pleasing and entertaining for her husband. Thus, women were not only kept far away from the public sphere but they were condemned to a life of idleness and insignificance.

The reason for that was that at the beginning of the nineteenth century large bodies of the society hold the view that women were inferior to men by nature. This notion of female inferiority was not only widespread among the society but also a prevailing theme of the works of numerous well-known writers such as Hannah Moore, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Rousseau, who wrote about the conduct and education of women.

A lot of critics claim that Jane Austen was totally familiar with those writings and that proof for that can be found in the representation of her heroines. As a consequence young women were educated in playing the piano, singing, drawing and needle-work. Most professions were closed to them and those that were open to women such as the work of a governess offered neither good working conditions nor enough money and were not highly respected among the upper middle classes.

Also higher education was not open to women since it was only the men who were allowed to attend a university and learn a higher profession. Therefore, the only possibility for most young women to establish status was by marrying well. If a woman did not marry she was dependent on her relatives for financial support and usually condemned to live with them.

Jane Austen: A Political Author of her Time?

English - Literature, Works. It neither overregulates nor ensures the wellbeing of citizens. It provides income via interest on securities, delivers the mail, and employs handsome and charming naval and militia officers. Yet she develops a rich and sophisticated theory of moral character development—virtue ethics—that earns her a position among the most astute moral philosophers. Scholars investigate the few fleeting political references in her novels and letters over and over, like sleuths rehashing the insufficient clues of an unsolved historical murder.

It is interesting, then, to reflect on the fact that some present-day Conservatives feel an affinity with Austen.

How does Jane Austen speak to today’s politics?

Theresa May has repeatedly cited Emma and Pride and Prejudice as her favourite novels. In an interview, Michael Gove was asked which author he would say wrote the Conservative manifesto. Perhaps the most consequential manifestation of this is the planned sharp reduction in immigration. May also holds positions that evoke a British nostalgia—specifically a rich, rural, white one—such as her support for fox hunting. Foreigners do not enter her mostly polite, well-to-do communities. Some of the men have travelled across faraway seas to unfamiliar lands, but the reader never accompanies them on these trips.

We meet them after they have come back and resettled into English country life. Yet that nostalgia might be misplaced. While some of her letters and paeans to the Navy in Persuasion and Mansfield Park exhibit a deeply-felt patriotism, if not xenophobia, it would be a mistake to take the ethnonational uniformity of her novels as her prescription for a thriving community.

Plausibility was one of her major aesthetic goals. She titled the three notebooks — Volume the First , Volume the Second and Volume the Third — which preserve 90, words she wrote during those years. Among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Freindship [ sic ], written at age fourteen in , [52] in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility.

Austen's History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith 's History of England When she was around eighteen years old Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works. In August , aged seventeen, Austen started writing Catharine or the Bower , which presaged her mature work, especially Northanger Abbey ; it was left unfinished and the story picked up in Lady Susan , which Todd describes as less prefiguring than Catharine. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison , by Samuel Richardson.

When Austen became an aunt for the first time at age eighteen, she sent new-born niece Fanny-Catherine Austen-Knight "five short pieces of For niece Jane-Anna-Elizabeth Austen also born in Jane Austen wrote "two more 'Miscellanious [sic] Morsels', dedicating them to [Anna] on 2 June , 'convinced that if you seriously attend to them, You will derive from them very important Instructions, with regard to your Conduct in Life. Between and aged eighteen to twenty Austen wrote Lady Susan , a short epistolary novel , usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work.

Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family.

Forgot Password?

Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters. According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide, who inspired Austen with stories of her glamorous life and various adventures. Eliza's French husband was guillotined in ; she married Jane's brother Henry Austen in He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister.

Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea".

Halperin cautioned that Austen often satirised popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him. Marriage was impractical as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career.

If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before " and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in as Sense and Sensibility.

Austen began a second novel, First Impressions later published as Pride and Prejudice , in She completed the initial draft in August , aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite".

Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts.

During the middle of , after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne , Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan — later Northanger Abbey — a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more.

In December George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath. She was able to make some revisions to Susan , and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons , but there was nothing like the productivity of the years — The years from to are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons.

She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted.

As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive — he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family.

He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance.

Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection". All of her heroines In , while living in Bath, Austen started but did not complete her novel, The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives". Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation.

Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen known as Frank pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham.

They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing , on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. In the family moved to Southampton , where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family. On 5 April , about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher.

She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time, [92] but was able to purchase it in Around early Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life — the use of a large cottage in Chawton village [i] that was part of Edward's nearby estate, Chawton House.

Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family's life in Chawton as "a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write. At the time, married British women did not have the legal power to sign contracts, and it was common for a woman wishing to publish to have a male relative represent her to sign the contract.

During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility , which, like all of Jane Austen's novels except Pride and Prejudice , was published "on commission", that is, at the author's financial risk. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them.

Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers; [] the edition sold out by mid Austen's novels were published in larger editions than was normal for this period. The small size of the novel-reading public and the large costs associated with hand production particularly the cost of handmade paper meant that most novels were published in editions of copies or less to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist. Even some of the most successful titles during this period were issued in editions of not more than or copies and later reprinted if demand continued.

Austen's novels were published in larger editions, ranging from about copies of Sense and Sensibility to about 2, copies of Emma. It is not clear whether the decision to print more copies than usual of Austen's novels was driven by the publishers or the author. Since all but one of Austen's books were originally published "on commission", the risks of overproduction were largely hers or Cassandra's after her death and publishers may have been more willing to produce larger editions than was normal practice when their own funds were at risk.

Editions of popular works of non-fiction were often much larger. While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels. Unknown to Austen, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced, pirated editions in France.

Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. Though Austen disliked the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request. In mid Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray , a better known London publisher, [k] who published Emma in December and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February Emma sold well but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma.

These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime. She completed her first draft in July In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma , Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March , depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and losing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums.

Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters. Austen was feeling unwell by early , but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration. Vincent Cope's retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease , although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma. She continued to work in spite of her illness.

Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots , she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August In the novel, Austen mocked hypochondriacs and though she describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa". Austen made light of her condition, describing it as "bile" and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed.

In May Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer. Tomalin describes it as "a loving and polished eulogy". In Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series.

In October , Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.

• La logica degli scacchi: Fondamenti, strategia, tecnica e tattica della partita. guida completa con oltre 400 schemi grafici. (Giochi) (Italian Edition)
• Freddies New World: The story of Freddie The Flycatcher
• THE SNOW-IMAGE; A CHILDISH MIRACLE. (Illustrated)
• The Hidden
• ERICA: EIGENTUM VON REX (German Edition)
• Plain Rude - an off-the-wall teen comedy about bats, maniacs and an emu called Bruce Willis (The Yarradindi Teen Comedy Series Book 2)
• The Gene Autry Book