Jane was so ill that she nearly died, but Mrs Cawley, for some inexplicable reason, made no attempt to alert her parents. Without delay Mrs Austen and her sister Mrs Cooper set off for Southampton to rescue their daughters, taking with them a herbal remedy that would supposedly cure the infection. The three girls never returned to Mrs Cawley. Listen to historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley sharing her thoughts on Jane Austen:.
There were, however, six sons in the Austen family — George was the second child of Revd Austen and his wife. He was also largely omitted from family memoirs. George, who was born in , suffered from epilepsy and learning difficulties and was probably deaf too.
For this reason he did not live with his family — he was instead looked after by a family who lived in the village of Monk Sherborne, not far from Steventon Rectory where Jane was born and where she grew up.
The Austens made financial provision for George and visited him regularly, but he was not truly part of their lives. George died at Monk Sherborne on 17 January at the age of He lies in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of All Saints Church. These large, rich cakes, which were similar to French brioche bread, were served warm and soaked in butter.
The Austen family ate theirs for breakfast traditionally 10am in the Georgian period , with tea or coffee. She clearly enjoyed her food but she also took an interest in it because she helped her mother and sister to run the Austen household on a tight budget. Jane noted the cost of food items, which rose and fell during the years that England was at war with France, and she collected recipes for the servants to try.
All her heroines fell in love with and married their perfect man, but Jane Austen was not so lucky herself — she received only one known offer of marriage. This unexpected proposal came from Harris Bigg Wither, the brother of her friends Elizabeth, Catherine and Alethea, who was heir to a considerable estate.
At first Jane accepted this tempting offer but soon changed her mind because she knew she would not be happy if she married a man she did not love. The British critic D. For the recreational reader, the novels are courtship stories, and the attraction is the strong women characters who, despite the best efforts of rivals and relations to screw things up, always succeed in making the catch.
This category of reader presumably makes up a big part of the audience for the movie and television adaptations, a steady stream of entertainment product that shows no signs of slowing. The English professor likes the strong women, too, and watches the adaptations with a learned and critical eye. But the professor thinks that the novels are about things that people like Churchill and Leslie Stephen thought they leave out: the French Revolution, slavery, the empire, patriarchy, the rights of women.
There are plenty of hints in the books about what is going on in the larger world. Those hints must be there for a reason. But what is the reason? Do the novels have a political subtext? Since there are few signs of unconventional political views in the biographical record, one approach is to separate Austen from her novels—what she believed from what she wrote.
But, in this case, it feels like fence-straddling. It asks us to accept an Austen who is somehow simultaneously conservative as a person and subversive as a writer. This was the right to enter private land for specified purposes, such as grazing, fishing, foraging, gathering firewood, and so on, and for many people in rural England it helped make ends meet.
Kelly cites the scholar Ruth Perry as calculating that access to private lands as virtually all lands in England were essentially doubled the income of farming families. Once those lands were legally enclosed, however, it became a crime to trespass on them. Kelly thinks that the poultry thieves who steal Mrs. Why else would Austen have put them in her story? The plot does not require turkey thieves. Knightley, in short, is a heartless landowner intent on building a private fiefdom.
She thinks the reason he marries Emma is that he wants to absorb her property, one of the few parcels of land around Highbury he does not already own, into his estate. But we know that Austen loved going to the theatre she also loved to dance , and that she enjoyed composing and acting in private theatricals organized by her siblings—which makes for an interesting interpretive problem.
And this turns out to be very hard to pin down. Like Keymer, Johnson and Tuite are therefore sometimes led into critical impasses, points at which an interpretation can be argued either way. Johnson and Tuite think that the reason we keep running into conundrums like these is that readers project their own views onto Austen. Some readers want to see a feminist, and other readers prefer to see a writer who does not make it her business to question the status quo.
Surely this is backward. She mostly depended on pocket money provided by her parents. She began to earn when Sense and Sensibility was published. Austen had to cover the publishing costs of Sense and Sensibility. Her brother Henry Austen and his wife Eliza de Feuillide helped foot the bill. Sense and Sensibility received positive reviews from critics for its "naturally drawn characters" and its plot: "the incidents are probable, and highly pleasing and interesting.
Austen didn't become a household name in her lifetime. Just after her death, her publisher destroyed the copies of her two final books , Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
It was in the Victorian era that she began to receive acclaim for her work and was recognized as a great novelist. Although A Memoir of Jane Austen revived the buzz around Austen, it has been described as a sanitized retelling of her life. Austen-Leigh depicted her as a quiet, domestic and happy woman. He also cited the Austen family as coming from a higher social background. As a result, she became inaccurately associated with the upper middle class.
The British Library currently houses several of Austen's manuscripts, including copies of her writing as a teenager, drafts of experimental or discarded novels and the novel she was working on the year she died. While Austen is known for her storytelling and polished writing, Kathryn Sutherland , a professor at Oxford University who has studied Austen's original handwritten works, suggests the pages of her original drafts were riddled with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and poor punctuation.
For 12 years following Austen's death, her work was out of circulation. Austen fervently admired Thomas Clarkson, a prominent campaigner against slavery. The author's views on slavery are hinted at in Mansfield Park when Fanny Price inquires about the slave trade in Antigua and is met with silence.
Many of Jane Austen's original manuscripts of her published novels are lost. They are said to have been thrown away after being printed. A part of the original manuscript for Persuasion has survived.
Austen was unhappy with the original ending of the novel and so she wrote two new chapters to replace what is now considered the "cancelled chapter. Other remaining manuscripts were intentionally preserved by Austen and passed down the family , including writing from her youth, poems and unfinished manuscripts.
Since the 20th century, the term Janeite has been used to describe devotees of Austen. The name was coined by English writer and literary critic George Saintsbury. Rudyard Kipling wrote a short story in entitled The Janeites , in which soldiers from the First World War come together and form a Masonic Lodge based on their shared love for Austen's novels. Austen was critical of her own work.
Upon finishing Pride and Prejudice she was worried that the novel was too frivolous. She described it as "rather too light and bright and sparkling. Pseudonyms will no longer be permitted. Before Jane could think about sending a novel off, she would have had to copy it out by hand, which would have taken a number of weeks, perhaps a couple of months.
Then she had to send the package off, wait for the publisher to read the novel, respond, and negotiate terms. Jane might already have been working on Sense and Sensibility before she wrote to Crosby to inquire about Susan. Too tempting, perhaps. Having waited for six long years, why write to Crosby then, when she was just about to move? Why the punning initials of the pen name? Why not simply change a few details and publish the novel elsewhere, without alerting him? Why not enlist the help of her brother Henry, who had presumably been involved in selling the manuscript in the first place?
At least it speaks, and at least it was written by her. The problem with any of these imaginings is that what Henry said was wrong. The draft fragment we know as The W atsons is dotted with crossings out, additions, and alterations. We even have an earlier attempt at an ending to Persuasion that Jane was dissatisfied with and rewrote. The notice is short but crammed with what might politely be called inconsistencies. She had, he says, very little opinion of her work and no thought of obtaining an audience.
Henry, in short, was lying, and his lies were deliberate ones. In part his aim was to protect himself and his siblings from the damaging idea that their sister might have wanted—or even needed—to write for money. But then again, his motives might have been fundamentally sound enough. He would have known how very unsympathetically female authors were treated. The reputation of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft had been dragged through the mud after her death in We have to remember, too, that the Austen family lived in a country in which any criticism of the status quo was seen as disloyal and dangerous.
Britain and France were at war from to , with only two brief pauses—in and from the summer of to February , when Napoleon was temporarily confined on the island of Elba, in the Mediterranean. From to , Britain was also at war with America, the colony that had rebelled in , the year after Jane Austen was born.
In , Paine was convicted in his absence of seditious libel—essentially, of writing down ideas dangerous to the state—but he continued to write, if anything more dangerously than before, questioning the very notion of private property, of organized religion even. Saddled with a monarch who was periodically insane, and an heir to the throne who was not only dissolute and expensive to run but had also illegally married a Catholic widow, the British state was under enormous strain even before the war with France began.
The war, for many years, went badly for Britain. People who criticized the behavior of the royal family, or complained about corrupt parliamentary elections, who turned away from the Church of England or asked whether those in power should really keep it, were perceived as betraying their country in its hour of need.
To question one aspect of the way society worked was to attempt to undermine the whole. In the process, Britain began to look more and more like a totalitarian state, with the unpleasant habits that totalitarian states acquire. Habeas corpus—the centuries-old requirement that any detention be publicly justified—was suspended. Treason was redefined. It was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill; it included thinking, writing, printing, reading.
Prosecutions were directed not just against avowedly political figures, such as Paine, the radical politician Horne Tooke, and the theologian Gilbert Wakefield, but against their publishers. A schoolmaster was convicted for distributing leaflets. A man was prosecuted for putting up posters. The proprietors of the newspaper The M orning Chronicle were brought into court.
Booksellers were threatened. Words were dangerous; reciting a piece of doggerel saw one Hampshire carpenter imprisoned for three years. Conservative writers flourished.
0コメント