Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, has a perfect life. She has decided never to get married but to live as the mistress at Hartfield, her father's house in the beautiful English countryside. But when she starts match-making, she finds that her imagination has led her into danger…
Topic for Discussion:
Besides bathing, what kind of leisure activities did British have at that time?
Vocabulary
1) resorts : holiday towns
2) gatherings : meetings of people.
3) neo-classical : a style of art that is based on or influenced by classical style.
Jane Austen was born on 16th December 1775 in the village of Steventon in the South of England. Her parents, an Anglican clergyman and his wife, a clergyman’s daughter, had eight children. Jane’s sister, Cassandra, was her favourite companion and they lived together or wrote to each other throughout their lives. It was normal for girls at that time to be educated at home after the age of eleven. They both read widely, learnt to play the piano, drew and learnt Italian and French.
The family moved to Bath in 1804. Bath was a large fashionable city with a lively social life but Jane and her sister had been happier in the small village where they were born. Jane’s father died in 1805 and the two sisters moved to Southampton, a large seaport, with their mother. Three years later, however, they moved to the village of Chawton where they lived in a spacious cottage. Jane lived there until she died in 1817 at the young age of forty-one. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
Jane’s talent as a writer emerged when he was still a child. She wrote stories to amuse the rest of her family. At sixteen, she wrote a comic history of world and by the age of twenty she had written several unpublished novels.
When Jane moved to Chawton, she successfully published her novels, often developing her previous work. She never tried to become famous and her work was published anonymously – ‘by a lady’. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion were the five great novels which she wrote in the cottage at Chawton.
Few people knew the identity of the writer of these works. However, the Prince Regent was an admirer of her stories and, at his request, she dedicated Emma to him. Many contemporary writers, including Sir Walter Scott, recognized that she had a ‘wonderful talent’.
Her novels often reflect her life. For example, one of her brothers was adopted by a rich family, the Knights, and did not live with the Austens. In Emma, Frank Churchill is the same situation. She describes the experience and feelings of upper class women very sensitively and, often, comically. Emma contains some memorable comic characters: the dreadful snob, Mrs Elto, poor Miss Bates who cannot stop talking, Mr Elton the sentimental vicar. One critic has described her work as ‘regulated hatred’ – she laughs at her enemies through her books and at the limitation of life in a small community.
All her novels centre on love and marriage but she is never sentimental. She suggests that a good relationship is based not only on romantic love but also on comfort, security and share opinions. It is believed that Jane fell in love while at Bath but that her admirer died young. Later, she accepted a marriage proposal from a rich landowner but changed her mind the next morning. Unlike the heroines in her novels, she never found the man that she wanted to marry.
We learn a lot about Jane’s ideas from her letters to Cassandra and to her niece, Anna. She wrote to Anna that for a novel, it was enough to write about ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’. This is a perfect description of the plot of Emma. Although her novels are limited in area, they express a depth of feeling and a rich sense of irony. They are still very widely read and are regularly adapted for television, the cinema or the theatre. The clergyman’s daughter who preferred to live in small villages has entertained the world for nearly 200 years.
The Life of Jane Austen
The World of Jane Austen
Part One - The Mistress of Hartfield House
Part Two - Match-Maker or Trouble-Maker?
Part Three - The Great Mistake
Part Four - A Trifling Young Fellow
Part Five - In Love or not in Love?
Part Six - Harriet is Rescued Twice!
Part Seven - The Disaster at Box Hill
Part Eight - The Autumn Marriages
