The Letters of Jane Austen

The recent cult for Miss Austen, which has resulted in no less than ten new editions of her novels within a decade and three memoirs by different hands within as many years, have made the facts of her life familiar to most readers. It was a short life, and an uneventful one as viewed from the standpoint of our modern times, when steam and electricity have linked together the ends of the earth, and the very air seems teeming with news, agitations, discussions. We have barely time to recover our breath between post and post; and the morning paper with its statements of disaster and its hints of still greater evils to be, is scarcely out-lived, when, lo in comes the evening issue, contradicting the news of the morning, to be sure, but full of omens and auguries of its own to strew our pillows with the seed of wakefulness. To us, publications come hot and hot from the press. Telegraphic wires like the intricate and incalculable zigzags of the lightning ramify above our heads; and who can tell at what moment their darts may strike? In Miss Austen's day the tranquil, drowsy, decorous English day of a century since, all was different.

Jane Austen (born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, England) and died on July 18, 1817 in Winchester, in the same county, is a woman of English literature. Her realism, her biting social criticism and her mastery of free indirect discourse, her offbeat humor and her irony made her one of the most widely read and loved English writers. All her life, Jane Austen remained in a closely knit family unit belonging to the English little gentry. She owes her education largely to her father and her elder brothers, as well as to her own readings. The unfailing support of his family is essential for his evolution as a professional writer3,4. Jane Austen’s artistic apprenticeship extends from her early teens to her twenty-fifth year. During this period she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel she experimented with before abandoning her, and wrote and reworked three major novels, while beginning a fourth. From 1811 to 1816, with the publication of Sense and Sensibility (published anonymously in 1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey (completed in 1803) and Persuasion, are both the subject of a posthumous publication in 1818; In January 1817, she began her last novel, finally entitled Sanditon, which she could not finish before her death. Jane Austen’s work is, among other things, a critique of the sentimental novels of the second half of the eighteenth century and belongs to the transition that leads to the literary realism of the nineteenth century. Jane Austen’s intrigues, although essentially of a comic nature, that is, with a happy outcome, highlight women’s dependence on marriage for social status and economic security. Like Samuel Johnson, one of his major influences, she is particularly interested in moral issues. Because of the anonymity it seeks to preserve, its reputation is modest during its lifetime, with some favorable criticism. In the nineteenth century, his novels were admired only by the literary elite. However, the publication in 1869 of A Memoir of Jane Austen, written by his nephew, makes it known to a wider audience. One discovers then an attractive personality, and, at the time, the popular interest for its works takes its rise.