Feminism in the Novels of Jane Austen

2019 ◽  
Vol 04 (01) ◽  
pp. 7-9
Author(s):  
Ashok Kumar Priydarshi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
Own Name

Jane Austen’s genius was not recognized either by her contemperaries or even by her successors. But about 1890 the tide of appreciation and popularity markedly turned in favour and correspondingly, against her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott. She always strives in her art to remain full conscious of her responsibility to life as an artist. She is known as the last blossom of the 18th century. She has six novels to her credit-‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park, ‘Emma’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’. Though she created her stories in her above-mentioned novels more than 200 years ago, her novels were forerunners of feminism. According to a critic, “Jane Austen was a published female novelist, who wrote under her own name, which can be seen as an important feminist quality”.

Jane Austen and the World of the Community

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Good Life ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
The One ◽  
Falling In Love

For two weeks now, I have wallowed in sinful luxury, rereading the six completed Jane Austen novels (especially my favorite parts), basking in the warmth and wit of her collected letters, eagerly absorbing the details of her life from her best biographies, and attentively following the arguments of her leading literary critics. I also saw the recent movie versions of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, falling in love with Emma Thompson and Amanda Root in quick succession, and finished off my orgy with viewings of the BBC videos of Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice. Throughout—at least when I could remember to pay attention—I had two questions in mind. What does Jane Austen have to say about people, communities, and nature? And what is the cause of her resurgent popularity? Perhaps, I allowed myself to think, the questions are related. Answering the questions proved not so simple, but I did have fun trying. Sam and I read Aunt Jane’s letter, dated 8 Jan. 1817, to her nine-year-old niece Cassy, beginning: . . . Ym raed Yssac I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey. Ruoy xis snisuoc emac ereh yadretsey, dna dah hcae a eceip fo ekac . . . . . . I read the amusingly mordant comments she could write about her neighbors, such as the one in her letter of 3July 1813 to her brother Francis, mentioning the “respectable, worthy, clever, agreable Mr Tho. Leigh, who has just closed a good life at the age of 79, & must have died the possesser of one of the finest Estates in England & of more worthless Nephews and Neices [sic] than any other private Man in the United Kingdoms.” I read the last chapters of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion each three times. I read once again about Catherine Morland’s cruel expulsion from Northanger Abbey, and about the ill-omened trip of Fanny Price, the Bertram sisters, and the Crawfords to the Rushworth estate, Sotherton, with its seductive, if too regularly planted, wilderness. And again I was privileged to accompany Emma Woodhouse, Miss Bates, Frank Churchill, and Mr. Knightly on the tension-charged picnic to Box Hill, surely one of the highest peaks in English literature.

scholarly journals According to Their Plots, Jane Austen’s Novels Are Not Comic Romances with Happy Endings

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Cynthia Whissell
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Sense And Sensibility

In order to answer two specific questions (“Do the plots of Jane Austen’s novels match the plot of Cinderella?” and “Do Austen’s novels include a comic or happy ending, defined as one where the author employs more pleasant language at the end of the novel than she did at the beginning?”), Jane Austen’s six major novels and Cinderella were scored for the pleasantness of their language with the Dictionary of Affect (Whissell, 2009). The answer to both questions, based on results of regression analyses and means comparisons, is negative. Austen’s novels are not variants of the Cinderella story, nor do they have the type of endings that characterize comic romances. Cinderella is very pleasant and has a distinct happy ending. In contrast, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey are less pleasant and have equivocal endings, while Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility have tragic (relatively unpleasant) endings. Persuasion employs the least pleasant language overall but has a happy ending.

Jane Austen’s Domestic Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Jones
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
The Way

This chapter studies the nature and quality of Jane Austen's originality. Beyond parody, but wittily in touch with contemporary fiction's excesses, beyond partisanship, but harnessing the language of polemical debates to illuminate ordinary experience, Austen set a rigorous standard for domestic realism. Key to Austen's originality is the way in which her novels transcend any attempt to reduce them to versions of the contemporary fictional subgenres in which she was nonetheless immersed. Though the fictional and political context in which she drafted her 1790s novels ( Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey) is very different from that in which she wrote and published Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818), this strategy is evident across all her fiction.

scholarly journals Jane Austen’s Global Influence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Halsey
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
The World ◽  
Original Works ◽  
The 19Th Century

Jane Austen (1775–1817) is a writer with a global reputation. She is one of a very few writers to enjoy both a wide popular readership and critical acclaim, and one of even fewer writers of her period whose name has instant recognition. Her literary reputation rests on six novels—Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818)—a handful of unfinished works, and three manuscript notebooks of juvenilia, but this small oeuvre has been translated into almost every known language, has been adapted for film and television across the world, and has spawned an enormous number of sequels, prequels, spin-offs, remediations, and other fan fictions in both print and digital media. Critics have, for more than two centuries, attempted both to describe the technical brilliance of Austen’s work and to account for her surprising popularity with very diverse audiences. Her works describe the daily realities of life in Georgian and Regency England but clearly still speak to modern, worldwide audiences. She is known simultaneously as a romance writer par excellence and as a deeply ironic and skeptical social commentator. Her style is characterized by economy, brevity, and wit, and through a series of technical innovations in the craft of writing, Austen transformed the genre of the novel and thus its status from the 19th century onward. Her international success, however, can be attributed only partly to the brilliance of her literary output and must, in part, be ascribed to the work of successive film adaptations of her novels, in particular the 1940 and 1995 versions of Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, respectively. Across the world, many people now know Austen’s works primarily through the medium of film adaptations of her novels and biopics that fictionalize her life. “Jane Austen” has become a lucrative brand, existing almost irrespective of the original works.

Jane Austen’s Six Novels

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Suk-Young Chwe
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Strategic Thinking ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
Strategic Skills

This chapter analyzes Jane Austen's six novels, arguing that each is a chronicle of how a heroine learns to think strategically. For example, in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland must learn to make her own independent choices in a sequence of increasingly important situations, and in Emma, Emma Woodhouse learns that pride in one's strategic skills can be just another form of cluelessness. In Pride and Prejudice, people's strategic abilities develop the least. Sense and Sensibility explores through the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood how strategic thinking requires both thoughtful decision-making and fanciful speculation. The chapter also examines Persuasion and Mansfield Park. In all six novels, Austen theorizes how people, growing from childhood into adult independence, learn strategic thinking.

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