Scarica Jane Austen - life and works e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JANE AUSTEN —> was the 1° woman to achieve fame as a writer. She was an English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people and ordinary life in literature. Jane Austen was born on the 16th of December of 1775, into a large family, in the little village of Stevenson. Her father, George Austen, was the rector of the parish and her mother, Cassandra Leigh, was known for her wit and her ability as a writer. Jane’s education began around 1782 —> she was sent to a boarding school in Oxford but, from 1787 on, they were educated by their father who transmitted to his daughters his love for literature. Jane Austen was a very precocious writer, she started writing at the age of 12. We know that she never married, and, after the death of her father, she settled with her mother and sister. She died on July 18th in 1817 and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. • Style and works During her life, Austen published anonymously a lot of novels and, only after her death, her brother Henry let people know about her identity. Austen’s novels fall in the category of novels of manners —> novels dominated by social customs, manners and habits of a definite social class. Critics often accuse her of portraying a limited world, but she intentionally restricted herself to write about small scale family or village events. The main Jane Austen’s goal is to criticise the hypocrisy of the english society she knew, and the role of women in that society. All of her works centre on the experience of a young woman who, at the end, marries happily. In fact, while social advancement for young men was in the military, in church or law, for women was the acquisition of wealth through a convenient marriage. We know that Austen herself never married, so we can ask us why she was so interested in love and only writes about marriage. I am sure that, like Virginia Woolf used to say, maybe she didn’t know the happiness of a happy love, but she certainly knew the pain of a suffered one. Since the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, the question of whether or not Austen was a feminist writer has been at the forefront of Austen criticism. Enlightenment feminism is a tradition of thought that claims that "women share the same moral nature as men, ought to share the same moral status, and exercise the same responsibility for their conduct". Many critics have argued that Austen is part of this tradition because her "heroines do not adore or worship their husbands, though they respect and love them. They are not, especially in the later novels, allowed to get married at all until the heroes have provided evidence of appreciating their qualities of mind, and of accepting their power of rational judgement, as well as their good hearts.”—> Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, is an example of such a protagonist. Many critics argued that Austen knew and admired the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, particularly “A vindication of the rights of woman” (1792). • Pride and prejudice (1813) The opening line of the novel announces: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”. —> This immediately sets marriage as the most relevant theme of the novel. When Elizabeth rejects Darcy's first proposal, the argument of marrying for love is introduced. Elizabeth only accepts Darcy's proposal when she is certain she loves him and her feelings are reciprocated. Austen's complex sketching of different marriages
