This article was written by Scout Pollack of Richard Montgomery High School.
Jane Austen: a name despised by high school English students across the country. Her works are familiar to most, and her characters and their stories have been depicted on the silver screen numerous times. Though she lived and died almost two centuries ago, her impact and staying power has made her one of the most well known female novelists of her time.
Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Hampshire, England, and she was one the youngest of seven. She and her older and only sister Cassandra attended boarding school for two years, before enrolling in and shortly after dropping out of the only other school they would attend. Though this was the end of her formal education her older brothers and father continued teaching her at home. In 1787, at the age of 11, she had written three journals full of short stories and poems later referred to as the Juvenilia. At the mere age of 14, Austen began to write professionally. Her first works were an incomplete six-act comedy called “Sir Charles Grandison or the Happy Man” and a series of letters that would be turned into a novel called Elinor and Marianne. By 1797, she had written the first draft of Pride and Prejudice, initially titled First Impressions, but to no success in the publishing world.
In 1801 her father retired and moved the family to Bath, a city full of wealthy and social members of the population. Austen despised her new home, and never finished the novel she was working on, entitled The Watsons. She was proposed to by a family friend and accepted but immediately withdrew her decision the next day. In 1805, when Jane was 29, her father died suddenly, and the women of the family had to rely on the men to afford their housing. She finished and published her most well known works, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, a few years later in 1811. She immediately started on her next piece, Mansfield Park, which was published the same year she started her novel Emma, in 1814.
At this point in time, she had started to receive attention and recognition for her modern style and her ability to allow the reader to connect with her characters and their experiences. This is later classified as both neoclassicism and romanticism, thought to bring imagination and more emotion to a story. Austen wrote nothing in the last couple years of her life that was published, and a collection of her pieces was published in 1832, known as “The Standard Novels”.
By 1817, the year of Austen’s death at age 41—due to what historians believe was Addison’s disease—her writing was known nationwide, as she was regarded as one of the most popular and most interesting authors in the early 1700s. Her technique of telling her stories through an almost third-person lens was a new concept at the time of her publications, and gave her writing the feel of intelligence and realism. In the 21st century, her writings are used in high schools and colleges all over the world; her style is considered revolutionary, a mother to many of the artistic styles used in literature currently.
The majority of Austen’s works were published anonymously, as women pursuing careers in writing were not considered ladylike or deemed acceptable by society in the 1700s. Austen, however, was quite rebellious when it came to the rituals for women in her time. Marriage, a woman’s main job in life, was something Austen never did, though it was expected of her as a way to contribute wealth and status to her family. Austen’s works and style paved the way for modern authors and styles that are seen as normal nowadays; her effect on the literature field is ongoing and the staying power of her stories establishes her as a monumental figure in modern literacy.
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