Jane Austen

A Penguin Life

By Carol Shields

A Lipper/Viking Book    USA   2001  p185

R: 18-21, Mar, 2012

1

Austen’s short life may have been lived in relative privacy, but her novels show her to be a citizen, and certainly a spectator, of a far wider world.—p4

Her (austen) insistent irony blunts rather than sharpens her tone.—p6

Intelligent women could not always be kept under control, and control was a husband’s obligation. –p7

“3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on”—austen wrote her niece Anna

“the little bit (2 inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”—austen wrote to her naphew James---p 8

...her trust in the microcosmic world is sucurely placed. It is also a brave and original view. Out of her young, questioning self came the grave certainty that the family was the source of art.---p8-9

The novelist George Gissing wrote that “the only good biographies are to be found in novels” .—p10

Fiction respects the human trajectory(轨迹). –p11

2

Jane Austen chose to focus her writing on daughters rather than mothers, but nevertheless mothers are essential in her fiction. They are the engines that push the action forward, even when they fail to establish much in the way of maternal warmth. Daughters achieve their independence by working against the family constraints, their young spirits struck from the passive, lumpish postures of their ineffectual or distanced mothers.—p15

A close bond between mothers and daughters is rare in the Austen novels,  but then mothering styles are forever in a state of change. –p16

3

Still later, readers come to appreciate the novels’ comic nbrilliance, laughiing out loud not just at situations, but at turns of phrase.—p26

4

And her mature work, too, can be read as a demonstration of submissive (顺从的)women and the wiles（欺骗） they use to get their way-their pointed courtesies, quiet words of reproof, or directed glances. At the same time, the novels show men and women to be equal in intellect and moral apprehension(理解).–p38-39

(These female relationships were important to Jane Austen, whose novels ring with the music of high spirits and feminine laughter.)—p40

Her father had given her a portable writing desk for her 19^th birthday, a pretty thing of mahogany (红木的) and leather, equipped with a glass inkstand and a drawer...... Lady Susan was the first piece she wrote at this new desk. –p45

5

(All the heroes of Jane Austen’s mature novels are reading men, men of the book, and clever Tom Lefroy is no exception.)—p49

She nver saw him (Tom Lefroy) again, although it is clear she thought of him. It is also apparent that the episode multiplied itself again and again in her novels, embedded in the theme of thwarted(被阻挠的) love and loss of nerve. –p50

6

Pride and Prejudice, turned on the human capacity to judge – misjudge - the difference between appearance and reality.—p 55

The novel (Pride and Prejudice) is so subtly paced that even after repeated readings readers find themselves growing tense as the story progresses, preparing for disappointment, fearing that Elizabeth has gone too far this time, that she has, through pride, through rigidity(坚硬) of mind, lost the one person capable of rescuing her and giving her the life she deserves. –p 56

Human beings required love and location, but society, with its sharp class separations, stood in th way of a woman’s fulfillment. –p58

7

And yet, Jane Austen was eccentric to her time. Another niece, Marianne Knight, remembers how her aunt, working quietly by the fire at Godmersham, would mysteriously burst into laughter and hurry across the room to write sth down, then return to her place. –p 67

8

We think of Pride and Prejudice as Jane Austen’s sunniest novel, and yet it was written during a preiod of unhappiness. –p 69

The detachment (超脱) of Jane Austen’s imaginative flight from her personal concerns is extraordinary, even given the fiction writer’s license. –p69

“She (JA) drew from nature; but whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals ,” said her brother Henry in his Biographical Notice, which prefaced Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818.—p75

10

She lived in a day when to be married was the only form of independence – and even then it was very much a restricted liberty. A married woman could achieve a home of her own, and with it a limited sphere of sovereignty.–p85

11

Jane Austen’s use of Bath demonstrates her precise understanding of new attitudes toward money and lesisure. ---p97

13

“A woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection agian.” – by Marianne of Sense and Sensibility.

“Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”—Austen to her niece Fanny.

She was not a woman who could marry without love and without even a measure of respect. –p109

14

The reality was that women without money were forced into marrages of compromise, which was what Jane Austen herself had recently rejected when she withdrew her promise to Harris Bigg-Wither. –p113

Jane Austen is sometimes thought of as being confined by her extremely naroow social view, but her work reveals a far wider optic lens.—p117

15

More important, interaction with a large slice of society permitted her to observe and to gather material for her novels.—p124

16 in Bath

“’Seven years I suppose are enough to change very pore(毛孔) of one’s skin and every feeling of one’s mind.”  Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra in 1805

Now she listened and observed the socail noise that went on around her, all the time widening her range of human understanding.—p130

17

Her (JA) bad luck was that she was enclosed all her life by obscurity(不解)....she wrote her novels behind a wall of isolation.—p141

A home-made article, Jane Austen’s nephew had called his aunt’s work. Her novels were conceived and composed in isolation. She invented their characters, their scenes and scenery, and their moral framework. The novelistic architecture may have been borrowed fromthe 18^th century novelists, but she made it new, clean, and rational, just as though she’d taken a broom to the old fussiness of plot and action. She did all this alone. –p142-143

19

The question of Fanny has teased the readers of Jane Austen’s novels for close to 2 centuries. Austen’s other heroines possess spirit and wit. In their youth and exuberance they are sometimes implite, rash, imprudent, mistaken in their judgment. Emma Woodhouse lacks maturity and tact. Elizabeth Bennet hurls herself blindly at life. Catherine of Northanger Abbey is helplessly curious. Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, Fanny Price’s closest sister in the oeuvre(全部作品), is easily led but at the same time innately wise and always supported by an inner assurance. –p153

Here is the case Cinderella syndrome(综合症), of the prisoner’s self-protective strategy. ---p154

She(fanny) is, in fact, quite silent for the first half of the novel, then bursts into a promising articulation in the second half of the novel. –p155

20

She(emma) is good at observing the people around her, although she makes great, gulping mistakes, as we know. And she is gifted at devising other, alternate arrangements for people;---p160

21

Mansfield Park has sold out, despite its quiet reception. Pride and Prejudice, the perennial(持久的) favorite, was in its 3^rd edition, and Sense and Sensibility in its 2^nd. –p164

“That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with.”—Walter Scott

22

The darkness of Persuasion, its vivid senuality, its use of accident and near misses, relates, perhaps, to the kind of fatalism that stared down at her, suggesting that she might be desperately rewriting the trajectory of her own life and giving it the gift of a happy ending. Elizabeth Bennet shared part of Austen’s own rebelliousness; Emma Woodhouse embodied some of her sense of mischief; Fanny of Mansfield Park might be thought of as Jane Austen attempting the role of dutiful goodness, performing an act of expiation(补偿) for the levity (轻率)and brightness she had brought to Pride and Prejudice. But Anne Elliot, more than any of these heroines, combines Austen’s sense of loss and loneliness, her regrets, her intelligence, and in the end, her willingness to lead a disappointed life. –p 170