JANE AUSTEN
Uploaded by mamuna gul on Mar 22, 2005
JANE AUSTEN
[Maimoona Ijaz]
As a woman of exquisite style and cultivated manners, Jane Austen was the zeitgeist of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.Her literary panorama includes novels like ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Emma’, ‘Persuasion’,’Mansfield Park’ together with ‘Northanger Abbey’.
Her novels are called ‘tea-table romances’ owing to the ordinary commonplace events in them. Her picture of life is a
delicate watercolor to put beside the more vigorous oil painting of Fielding.The novel which in the hands of Richardson and Fielding had been a faithful record of real life and of the working of heart and imagination became in the closing years of eighteenth century, the literature of crime, insanity and terror. It, therefore needed castigation and Jane Austen did the needful.She brought good sense and balance to the English Novel, which during the Romantic Age had become too emotional and undisciplined. She refined and simplified English Novel, making it a true reflection of English life,in which people do little more than talk to one another about their trivial interests.
During the time of great turmoil and revolution in various fields, she quietly went on with her work, contenting herself with meager remuneration. She is one of the sincerest examples in English Literature of art for art’s sake.She had an acute power of observation that the simple country people of her own surroundings became the dramatis personae of her novels. Her painting of life has a Chinese fidelity and a miniature delicacy.
Jane Austen was a realist. Her realism makes her think it foolish to worry about evils one cannot prevent. Like Chaucer and Shakespeare she accepts the ‘law of nature’.
Miss Austen’s world has been called as ‘two-inches of ivory’’ or’ ivory towered’. She told almost the same story in all her novels, but she never repeated herself. Each of her books is distinguished from the other by important individual difference. Her compass of novels is not wide but within it she never fails. She is mistress of much deeper emotions than appears on the surface.
Jane...