Abstract
Jane Austen (1775–1817) was formerly hailed as the first woman writer to make and retain her mark in the accepted, indispensable canon of English literature. Now that women’s contribution is more visible, and she is known to be far from the first, the reasons for her unique appeal are hotly debated, while the popularity of her six completed novels continues to grow among scholars, general readers, and fans. She can be, and is, read as a romance-writer or a comic writer, a realist or a satirist. She is perhaps most widely admired for delineation of character, yet readers differ sharply among themselves in their response to some of her characters. Rather than describing her central figures, she employs free indirect speech (which she is said to have originated), to present a character’s subjective perceptions and interpretations in the confident tone of omniscient narration: her reader is drawn into sharing in the character’s unique viewpoint in a manner that may need to be corrected as the evolving story casts doubt on the character’s judgment, as self-centered or at least flawed.
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References
Austen, Jane. 2006. Juvenilia. Edited by Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Austen, Jane. 2011. Jane Austen’s Letters. Edited by Deirdre Le Faye. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Austen, Jane. 1980–2. The Novels of Jane Austen. 6 vols. Edited by R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed; revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. 2006. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge (by subscription: orlando.cambridge.org).
Burney, Frances. 1796. Camilla; Or, A Picture of Youth. 5 vols. London: T. Payne, T. Cadell, Jun., and W. Davies.
Fallon, Amy. 2 June 2011. “V S Naipaul finds no woman writer his literary match – not even Jane Austen.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/02/vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers
Woolf, Virginia. 1986–94. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 4 vols. Ed Andrew McNeillie. Hogarth Press.
Further Reading
Barchas, Janine. 2013. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fergus, Jan. 1991, Jane Austen: A Literary Life. Macmillan Press and St Martin’s Press.
Lascelles, Mary 1939. Jane Austen and Her Art. Oxford University Press.
Looser, Devoney 2017. The Making of Jane Austen. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tomalin, Claire 1997. Jane Austen: A Life. Penguin Viking.
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Grundy, I. (2023). Austen, Jane. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_21-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_21-2
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Austen, Jane- Published:
- 11 February 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_21-2
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Austen, Jane- Published:
- 28 October 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_21-1