Jane Austen

1775~1817

Virginia Woolf called Austen "the most perfect artist among women.“

Biography

• 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817

• She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading.

• She remained unmarried all her life.

Major Works • Sense and Sensibility (1811)

• Pride and Prejudice (1813)

• Mansfield Park (1814)

• Emma (1815)

• Northanger Abbey (1818) (posthumous)

• Persuasion (1818) (posthumous)

Influence • Her work brought her little personal

fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public.

• By the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship.

More about Jane Austen

Focus of Austen Novels

• Jane Austen is one of the realistic novelists. She drew vivid and realistic pictures of everyday life of the country society in her novels.

Quotation

Three or four families in a country village is something to

work.

Jane AustenJane Austen

Main Concern of Jane Austen

• Jane Austen’s main concern is about human beings in their personal relations, human beings with their families and neighbors.

Theme • Stories of love and

marriage provide the framework for all her novels and in them women are always taken as the major characters.

Linguistic Feature

• Jane Austen is successful in the employment of irony and frequent use of witty and delightful dialogues .

Pride and Prejudice

• The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England.

Background• a particular situation of the Bennet family:

• The estate where they reside is entailed to one of Mr Bennet's relatives—male only in this case—by the legal terms of fee tail. Mr and Mrs Bennet have no sons: this means that, if Mr Bennet dies soon, his wife and five daughters will be left without home or income. Mrs Bennet worries about this predicament and wishes to find husbands for her five daughters quickly.

Pride and Prejudice

• Arrogant Mr. Darcy met biased Miss Elizabeth, causing the emotional entanglement.

• Finally, the true love that finally broke the pride and prejudice.

• A Wealthy bachelor, is bound to take a wife, this is a truth universally acknowledged.