| Jane Austen died leaving behind six novels. Her novels are conspicuous for its lack of
event, allowing biographers to make it a study in quiet contemplation. She had an eye for
the ridiculous in contemporary taste, which is noted in Northanger Abbey along with the
heroines penchant for Gothic fiction. Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and
Persuasion examine small groups of people deliberately portrayed in a limited, perhaps
confining environment and Austen moulds the apparently trivial incidents of their lives
into a poised comedy of manner. Her characters are middle-class and provincial.
Austen’s urgent preoccupation is with courtship and her target ambition is marriage.
Austen sets about her task with a careful shaping of her material with a delicate economy
and a precise deployment of irony to point to the underlying moral point.
If we talk about her three
early novels, the most striking feature was that each approaches its subject in a
radically different way. Sense and Sensibility is more a debate, Pride and Prejudice a
romance and Northanger Abbey a satire, a novel about novels and novel reading. Jane Austen
being too inventive and much interested in the technique of fiction was able to tackle the
problems of three such diverse forms with all ease and astonishing skill.
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In Sense and Sensibility the debate is about the behavior in which Jane compares the discretion, polite lies and carefully preserved privacy of one sister with openness, truthfulness and freely expressed emotion of other. Austen reveals how far society can tolerate transparency and its effect on the individual. Pride and Prejudice is most popular of Jane Austen’s books, inside her family and out, for all time. Its explicit good-humored comedy, its sunny heroine and its dream denouement are worth enjoying. Northanger Abbey seems to be started in the aftermath of a family tragedy. But as usual there is very little trace of personal allusion in the book, though it is more a family entertainment, with pictures of Bath. The heroine does not adhere to the usual rules of fiction and is not clever and an average looking ordinary girl, without accomplishments or admirers.
Mansfield Park is more a novel about the condition of England. It reveals the severe contradiction between the people with strongly held religious and moral principles, not compromising them at all and considers a marriage only if its based on true feelings rather than opportunism. |
It is revolted by sexual
immorality; and a group of worldly, highly cultivated, entertaining and well-to-do young
people, who pursue having nothing to do with religious or moral principles. Emma is
generally praised as Jane’s most perfect book, flawlessly carried out from conception
to finish, without any rough patch or loose end. It reminds us of Racine’s play,
Offering a World, as carefully and satisfactorily enclosed. The first time reading
surprises us as the pleasures of a detective story are added to the study of human
psychology. The deeper reading increases understanding and praise of its structure and
subtlety. Persuasion is a remarkable leap into a new mood and a new way of looking
at England. The remarkable portrait of Mrs Croft is of a distinctly new woman, who is
tough, humorous, middle-aged, and always right in her judgment, proving old-fashioned
values of prudence wrong. |
