Jane Austen’s Influence on Literature
“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.” This was one of many austere comments made by Jane Austen in her book Mansfield Park. It was this radical way of writing that captured the attention of readers from all over, and made a lasting impression on scholars, critics, and readers for centuries. Austen tremendously impacted the world of literature by introducing a new style of writing, using new literary devices to describe her daily life, and continuing to remain current throughout the centuries.
Jane Austen was one of the first writers to introduce an entirely new style of writing. Before Austen wrote her novels, the writing was unrealistic, dismissable and unrelatable. The
She was very talented and passionate about her work. However, living in the 19th century made it especially hard to express her wonderful ideas as a woman. This forced her to publish most of her books anonymously so that people would not automatically dismiss her work (Christine, 2012, Writer Hero: Jane Austen). In fact, critics didn 't fully appreciate her style of writing at the time. They thought that Jane’s popularity was overrated because of her limited thought to her small world and it’s small concerns. In direct contrast, it was this exact idea that made her popular. It related her books to everyday life and appealed to the modern reader (Mullan, 2015, How Jane Austen’s Emma Changed the Face of Fiction). The way Jane wrote provided a gentle, easy-to-follow rhythm, using literary devices to move towards subjects floating through irony and criticism. This allows the reader to view the subject through humor and enjoyment but also clearly understanding the point Jane is trying to make (Collins, 2009, What Would Jane Do?). In her popular book Emma, it is the first time that an author writes in a third-person point of view, shares a character 's judgments, and follows the path to their decisions. This technique opened up a new world of opportunities, combining the internal and external world of a character in a novel (Mullan, 2015, How Jane Austen’s Emma Changed the Face of Fiction). Jane Austen had
Although writings were fictional she used precise incidents and described her own life with extraordinary detail. Her writings were creating a window into the thoughts, actions, relationships, and morality of daily life. The honesty in her writing is an impeccable eye opener to how things really were (Sutherland, Jane Austen: Social Realism and the Novel). Jane also included the perspective of women in the gentry class. In the 19th century, women had limited opportunity. The main focus of a woman 's life was to be married into social respect and financial security. Austen included this aspect in her stories. With most of the life of a women being inside, it was crucial to include conversation in her fiction. Not only did she include it, but she “wrote some of the most natural and real-seeming conversations in literature.” (Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Social Realism and the Novel). Jane wrote her heroines to be realistic, average, everyday people to appeal to the modern day world. Her protagonists were most always “strong and firm in their determinations.” Instead of seeing heroes as unrealistic images portrayed in Gothic novels, she made a hero that wasn’t necessarily obvious. This appealed to most everyone in the century and no longer portrayed women as shallow, but as deep, strong characters that have emotions and needs just like everyone else (Christine 2012, Writer
The Regency Period in England was an extravagant era often associated with prominent social, political, economic, and artistic advancements. It took place in the early 1800’s and was a time of much elegance and aristocracy. Movies and books set in this time period all seem to highlight the elegance and romance that was prevalent at the time. Famous Regency Era literary works, such as Pride and Prejudice, portray young English women getting their happily-ever-after endings with their true loves. Unfortunately, such endings did not actually happen to real women of the era because they lived very austere and vapid lives. They hardly had a choice in many of their lives’ decisions and had little to no career options. These women were raised from birth to be lady-like, obedient, and agreeable in order to attract respectable men to marry, as they were fully dependant on men. Women were essentially treated as property passed on from their fathers to their husbands. They had many restrictions placed on them and often weren’t even allowed to walk outside without proper accompaniment. Because the expectations placed on women were so rigid and absurd, some feminist authors from the time ridiculed these social standards in their writing. Famous novelist Jane Austen was known for satirizing many social customs of the Regency Period in her romantic fiction novels, placing a special emphasis on women’s rights. Pride and Prejudice in particular depicted protagonist Elizabeth Bennet as a smart, headstrong, free thinking individual who didn’t let negative outside forces sway her beliefs. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen challenges the social propriety and creates her own ideals for women through Elizabeth Bennet’s independence, intelligence, and stron...
Jane Austen, the author of many novels in the 19th century including Sense and Sensibility, became a well known author in the 20th century after her death. She was considered one of the greatest writers of English Literature and had a very quiet background. Her books, which did not gain popularity until the 1860s, are said to depict eighteenth-century ladies' and draw parallels between romance and realism.
Moving from the home she adored was troublesome for Jane, particularly in light of the fact that the family lived in a few better places until 1809, when Mr. Austen passed on. Amid that time of nine years, Austen did not compose. After her dad's demise, Austen and her mom and sister moved to Chawton, a nation town where Austen's sibling loaned the family a house he claimed. There Austen could seek after her work once more, and she composed Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Mansfield Park, which was published in 1814, narrates the story of Fanny Price, a young lady from a poor family who is raised by her rich auntie and uncle at Mansfield Park. The book concentrates on profound quality and the battle amongst heart and societal weights and is considered by a few pundits to be the "primary present day novel” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).
Jane Austen wrote this book trying to make people understand about the period of time this book was set in. Jane Austen’s book has many reasons for why the book was set in this time and one of them is the gender issues back then. Back then men and women weren’t permitted to do certain things and were expected to act in a certain way because if you were different it wasn’t considered good unlike nowadays, we can be different and nobody really cares, it’s who you are.
During the 1800s, society believed there to be a defined difference in character among men and women. Women were viewed simply as passive wives and mothers, while men were viewed as individuals with many different roles and opportunities. For women, education was not expected past a certain point, and those who pushed the limits were looked down on for their ambition. Marriage was an absolute necessity, and a career that surpassed any duties as housewife was practically unheard of. Jane Austen, a female author of the time, lived and wrote within this particular period. Many of her novels centered around women, such as Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, who were able to live independent lives while bravely defying the rules of society. The roles expected of women in the nineteenth century can be portrayed clearly by Jane Austen's female characters of Pride and Prejudice.
In the ordered English town of Highbury in Jane Austen’s Emma, people live a well constructed life, which shapes the views of social classes in their world. Despite the fact that Emma is a nineteenth-century novel, it represents a time when women depended on economic support from men. This method is observed through the main character Emma, who spends a great deal of her time agonizing about wealth and potential power. In the novel, readers are introduced to Emma as a young prosperous woman who manages her father’s house. Since she is younger than her two sisters, she is introduced to various female characters, which influence her social development and exemplify a range of gender roles available to her. In Emma’s household women are superior to men, as her father demonstrates feminine tendencies and the women are portrayed as masculine. This could be the reason Emma prides herself in being an advocate of structuring prosperous relationships within her community. When Emma considers prosperous relationship, she begins by categories people by their power and beauty. In Emma’s mind, power and beauty is the ideal combination to developing a perfect society. In Jane Austen‘s Emma, the main character Emma uses her obsession with beauty and power to create her own utopia. Emma’s utopia reconfigures the social system so that hierarchy is defined by looks and character instead of birthrights. However, when Emma’s attempt to create her own utopia fails, Austen challenges readers to accept the existing order and structure of the early nineteenth century English society.
Jane Austen wrote only about the world she knew, because she only lived in small villages on the south of England. Austen wrote about the normal daily life of women of her age and class. During the lifetime of Austen, she wrote about six books, but the book “Persuasion” by Jane Austen...
Jane Austen Society of North America, Inc. A Brief Biography. jasna.org. 26 April. 2014.
Jane, Austen,. Emma complete, authoritative text with biographical, historical, and cultural contexts, critical history, and essays from contemporary critical perspectives. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.
...f society and the desire to marry into a higher class, she is able to expose her own feelings toward her society through her characters. Through Marianne and Elinor she displays a sense of knowing the rules of society, what is respectable and what is not, yet not always accepting them or abiding by them. Yet, she hints at the triviality and fakeness of the society in which she lived subtly and clearly through Willoughby, John Dashwood and Edward Ferrars. Austen expertly reveals many layers to the 19th century English society and the importance of having both sense and sensibility in such a shallow system.
Austen was raised in an unusually liberal family where her father was a part of the middle-landowning class. They had a moderate amount of luxuries, but were not considered well off. Unlike many girls of her time Austen received a fairly comprehensive education. She received this mainly through the undivided support of her family. Austen and her sisters, like most girls of their time, were homeschooled. Austen’s zealous parents encouraged the girls to play piano, read and write. Her parent’s encouragement led to her interest in writing. Austen’s father housed an extensive library filled with books which kept Austen occupied for years (“Sense and Sensibility” 119). Through her observant nature and passion to read and write, Austen was able to eloquently write of the many “hidden truths” of social and class distinction during her time. They included daily societal changes some of which foreshadowed future societal leniency. Familial support also extended societal norm of marriage. Her parents attempt...
Pride and Prejudice, one of Jane Austen’s masterpieces, makes use of satire to promote social change, because the English society of the 19th century only saw marriage as a ticket that would help you move upward on the social ladder. Throughout the book, the reader gets front row seats as Austen mocks both the conservative middle class and upper class, giving the dissentient characters a chance to be seen in society with a better image. Austen expresses her feelings on why social changes must occur to her audience by making use of satire to describe Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Hurt, and Miss Bingley in comparison to the way she develops characters such as Elizabeth Bennet and the wealthy gentleman Fitzwilliam Darcy. Furthermore, while the reader gets to witness dramatic moments from Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Hurst, and Miss. As Bingley strives to comply with the traditions of the 19th century, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy play a significant role in trying to demonstrate to the reader why love should be the chief reason for marriage.
The literature output in Jane Austen’s creation is full of realism and irony. Janet Todd once asserted that "Austen creates an illusion of realism in her texts, partly through readably identification with the characters and partly through rounded characters, which have a history and a memory.” (Todd, The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen, 28.) Her works are deeply influenced between by late eighteenth-century Britain rationalism phenomenon and early nineteenth-century of romanticism.
Mansfield Park is a complete socially oriented novel. In this novel Jane Austen closely describe the everyday life of rural middle class society, its gaieties and hardships, describing a distinct system of moral and social principles influencing people’s lives in that period, women status in the system and female life expectations. In the novel Austen shows the efforts of some trying to break the predetermined limitations in order to improve their social class and rank. Austen pointed out the social threats that might ruin the women’s lives permanently (Johnson, Jane Austen: women, politics, and the novel / Claudia L. Johnson 1988). Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park is a classic text. The text almost absolutory concentrated on a small section of society including, the upper middle class of rural England, to which Jane Austen was belonged to Jane Austen’s writing demonstrate beliefs, values and represent an ideology that accentuate devoting principles along with economic and social power, with little citation to the miseries of the working class.
Jane Austen's writing style is a mix of neoclassicism and romanticism. Austen created a transition into Romanticism which encourages passion and imagination in writing instead of a strict and stale writing style. It is very emotional and follows a flowing not structured form. Mixing these two styles was one of Austen's strongest talents, which gave her an edge in the literary world. No other author in her time was able to create such a strong transition between writing styles. Austen used her sharp and sarcastic wit in all of her writing including in one of her most famous works; Pride and Prejudice. She could create a powerful and dramatic scene and immediately lead it into a satirical cathartic scene. We see these in various locations in Pride and Prejudice. She was able to use her experiences as well as her intense knowledge to create meaningful insights into her words, regardless of what topic she would be discussing. She often talks about marriage, or breaking the roles of what a person should be. She made controversial works that praised imperfections which praised the...