Though she always had her admirers, Jane Austen was not the most popular or most highly-praised novelist of her era (none of her novels were reprinted in English between 1818 and 1831), and she was not generally considered a great novelist until the late nineteenth century (). During her lifetime, boosted Jane Austen through his review of Emma, but nowadays it is Jane Austen who is used to boost Sir Walter Scott - Jane Austen's comments () on Scott's Waverley have been used as a back cover blurb for recent reprintings of Scott's novel.
One thing that many contemporary readers felt to be lacking in Jane Austen's novels was their failure to be `instructive' (i. e. to teach a moral), or `inspirational' (that is "to elevate mankind by their depiction of ideal persons, even in defiance of the known realities of ordinary life" - , p.14). Jane Austen makes fun of such didactic tendencies in her ending to Northanger Abbey: "I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny or reward filial disobedience." In her last work (Sanditon), she has a very foolish character () criticize novels like those she herself writes as "vapid tissues of Ordinary occurrences from which no useful Deductions can be drawn". Jane Austen also once said (in ) that "pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked", and she satirized the frequent lack of realism in the literature of the day in her Plan of a Novel: "there will be no mixture... the Good will be unexceptionable in every respect - and there will be no foibles or weaknesses but with the Wicked, who will be completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of Humanity left in them". What many other contemporary readers did admire in Jane Austen's novels was their plausibility and depiction of real life - as opposed to the sensationalism, unlikely meetings between long-lost relatives, villainous aristocratic would-be ravishers, etc. that were the stock in trade of much of the literature of the period.
Thus one Anne Romilly wrote in 1814 that
"Mansfield park... has been pretty generally admired here, and I think all novels must be that are true to life which this is... It has not however that elevation of virtue, something beyond nature, that gives the greatest charm to a novel."
In the Opinions of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen recorded the comments of one Lady Gordon:
"In most novels you are amused for the time with a set of Ideal People whom you never think of afterwards or whom you the least expect to meet in common life, whereas in Miss A----'s works, & especially in M [ansfield] P [ark] you actually live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family; & the scenes are so exactly descriptive, so perfectly natural, that there is scarcely an Incident, or conversation, or a person, that you are not inclined to imagine you have at one time or other in your Life been a witness to, borne a part in, & been acquainted with."
In a letter of May 1813, soon after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Annabella Milbanke (later Lady Byron) wrote in a letter that
"I have finished the Novel called Pride and Prejudice, which I think a very superior work. It depends not on any of the common resources of novel writers, no drownings, no conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lap-dogs and parrots, nor chambermaids and milliners, nor rencontres [duels] and disguises. I really think it is the most probable I have ever read. It is not a crying book, but the interest is very strong, especially for . The characters which are not amiable are diverting, and all of them are consistently supported."
In 1815 one William Gifford wrote
"I have for the first time looked into P. and P. ; and it is really a very pretty thing. No dark passages; no secret chambers; no wind-howlings in long galleries; no drops of blood upon a rusty dagger - things that should now be left to ladies' maids and sentimental washerwomen."
Austen wrote her books at the dawn of the nineteenth century, when vast social changes were already encroaching on the way of life she so loved and rendered with such exquisite artistry. We read her books today on the cusp of a new century, with an unfathomable world creeping up on us, too--one globally interconnected, technologically complex, economically uncertain. Perhaps we find on Austen's rural estates and in her charming, insular society the same peace and pleasure she found there; and an analogue for the simpler, more circumscribed world of our own childhoods, itself passing quickly away into history.The time in which Jane Austen wrote her novels was a period of great stability just about to give way to a time of unimagined changes. At that time most of England's population (some thirteen million) were involved in rural and agricultural work: yet within another twenty years, the majority of Englishmen became urban dwellers involved with industry, and the great railway age had begun. Throughout the early years of the century the cities were growing at a great rate; the network of canals was completed, the main roads were being remade. Regency London, in particular, boomed and became, among other things, a great centre of fashion. On the other hand, England in the first decade of the nineteenth century was still predominantly a land of country towns and villages, a land of rural routines which were scarcely touched by the seven campaigns of the Peninsular War against Napoleon.But if Austen's age was still predominantly one of rural quiet, it was also the age of the French Revolution, the War of American Independence, the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the first generation of the Romantic poets; and Jane Austen was certainly not unaware of what was going on in the world around her. She had two brothers in the Royal Navy and a cousin whose husband was guillotined in the Terror. And although her favourite prose writer was Dr. Samuel Johnson, she clearly knew the works of writers like Goethe, Worsdworth, Scott, Byron, Southey, Godwin and other, very definitely nineteenth-century, authors.
1. Southam, "Criticism, 1870-1940", The Jane Austen Companion, 102.
2. Lascelles, 2; for detail on "lower fringes", see Collins, ix-x.
3. Lascelles, 4-5; MacDonagh, 110-28; Honan, 79, 183-85; Tomalin, 66-68.
4. Litz, 3-14; Grundy, "Jane Austen and Literary Traditions", The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, 192-93; Waldron, "Critical Responses, Early", Jane Austen in Context, p.83, 89-90; Duffy, "Criticism, 1814-1870", The Jane Austen Companion, 93-94.Litz, 142.
5. MacDonagh, 66-75; Collins, 160-161.
6. Honan, 124-27; Trott, "Critical Responses, 1830-1970", Jane Austen in Context, 92.
7. Fergus, "Biography", Jane Austen in Context, 3-4.
8. Le Faye, "Letters", Jane Austen in Context, 33.
9. Le Faye, A Family Record, 270; Nokes,1.
10. Le Faye, A Family Record, 279.
11. Fergus, "Biography", Jane Austen in Context, 3-4.Honan, 29-30.
12. Honan, 11-14; Tucker, "Jane Austen's Family", The Jane Austen Companion, 143.
13. Tomalin, 6, 13-16, 147-51, 170-71; Greene, "Jane Austen and the Peerage", Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, 156-57; Fergus, "Biography", Jane Austen in Context, 5-6; Collins, 10-11.
14. Irene Collins estimates that when George Austen took up his duties as rector in 1764, Steventon comprised no more than about thirty families. Collins, 86.
15. Honan, 14, 17-18; Collins, 54.
16. Fergus, "Biography", 3; Tomalin, 142; Honan, 23, 119.
17. MacDonagh, 50-51; Honan, 24, 246; Collins, 17.
18. Le Faye, Family Record, 22.
19. Tucker, "Jane Austen's Family", 147; Le Faye, Family Record, 43-44.
20. Le Faye, Family Record, 20.
21. Le Faye, Family Record, 27.
22. Tomalin, 7-9; Honan, 21-22; Collins, 86; Le Faye, Family Record, 19. Le Faye and Collins add that the Austens followed this custom for all of their children.
23. Le Faye, Family Record, 47-49; Collins, 35, 133.
24. Tomalin, 9-10, 26, 33-38, 42-43; Le Faye, Family Record, 52; Collins, 133-134.
25. Le Faye, "Chronology", 2-3; Grundy, "Jane Austen and Literary Traditions", 190-91; Tomalin, 28-29, 33-43, 66-67; Honan, 31-34; Lascelles, 7-8. Irene Collins believes that Austen "used some of the same school books as the boys" her father tutored. Collins, 42.