A Preface to Jane Austen

Christopher Gillie

Longman    London    1974    p 171

R: 8-10,Apr,2012

Contents

Part one: biographical background

1 character and Family background

2 Religion

3 mysteries and uncertainties

4 Juvenilia

Part two: literary background

5 Augustan sense and sensibility

6 literary contemporaries: isolation and involvement

7 the 18^th century novel

8 the arts and the social order

9 women in life and literature

Part three: the art of Jane Austen

10 characterization: heroines and heroes

11 the construction of the novels

12 Emma

13 Jane Austen’s place in English fiction

Part four: reference section

Introduction

What has caused critics of the 20^th century to recognize the true greatness of the work which she(JA) accomplished is a sense of its unusual modernity. This is an effect of the alertness of her consciousness. Whatever our terrible shortcomings, we have learned from our characteristic thinkers—our psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists—that survival depends on how well we can understand ourselves, and that our understanding depends on what we can observe, on how well we can interpret the evidence, and on how far we can relate the different categories of evidence to one another. (xii)

Part One Biographical Background

1  Character and Family Background

One of the most misleading facts that are widely konwn about J Austen is that her life was what is called ‘uneventful’.---p3

She was born on 16 Dec. 1775,...at Steventon in Hampshire, the 7^th in a family of 8 children.....She died on 18 July 1817, in Winchester,....she never left the south of England....she received most of her education at home......publication of the novels: Sense and Senibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfielf Park (1814), Emma (1815); after her death, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, in December 1817.---p3

2  Religion

There wrere 2 principal styles of clergyman working in the Church of England in Jane Austen’s lifetime. The first, which we may call the ‘Establishmen’ kind, saw their profession in the same light as any other profession.... The other kind were designated ‘Evangelicals(福音主义者)’, because they were evangelists who tried to reach the hearts of their parishioners. ---p 12

Jane Austen and the Clergy

Her(JA) faith was positive and important to her, but inclined to be conservative (if we can think of evangelicalism as ‘progressive’) and reticent, though I shall later try to demonstrate that Mansfield Park is fundamentally a religious novel. .... she seems to have divided her values into 2 sets: those that were ‘religious’, relating to conduct and social relationships, and the ‘personal’ set, having to do with the feelings of individuals for one another. ---p 17

Candour

It is certain taht she had a strong inclination to sharp and even cruel humour, and that this runs counter to the general impression left by her relatives of her unusual sweetness of nature. The 6 novesl are triumphs of sympathetic insight, but they also contain triumphs of caricature(夸张的描述); the Austen method is to blend the 2 by manipulating varied and more or less subtle tones of irony. Their principal theme could be expressed as the education and chastening of the judgement. ---p 18  

3 Mysteries and Uncertainties

Tennyson, who was a strong admirer of Jane Austen, remarked,......no more was known about than about Shakespeare: sheer absence of data obviated the temptation to distracting and unverifiable speculation. ---p 19

There was the arrest in Bath of her highly respectable aunt,...for shoplifting. Mrs. Austen offered her the society of Cassandra and Jane in prison, but.... refused. ....discoved that she had been ‘framed’ with motives of blackmail. There was also the execution of Elizabeth de Feuillide’s first husband, and the historic trial of Warren Hastings....the bankruptcy of her brother, Henry, sudden and premature bereavements, the dangers undergone by her sailor brothers in the long wars. ---p 19-20

4 Juvenilia

Love and Friendship: burlesque tales

Evelyn

In 1792 she was writing stories in which burlesque mingles with more serious writing. As stories, they are less successful, but as experiments they are more interesting. The strangest of them is Evelyn, which reads like the description of a dream and has a fable-like quality such as dreams often convey. ---p30

Catharine

Jane Austen was later to centre her novels on some young girl who learns to distinguish the true from the false in herself by the gradual discovery that neither she nor those about her are really what she had at first assumed them to be. Among the fragments of 1792 is an unfinished novel, Catharine, which seems to have been her first serious attempt at such a theme. ---p32

Intervening work

Part Two   Literary Background

5.Augustan Sense and Sensibility

Johnson’s conception of the human condition is closer to Jane Austen’s than is that of Cowper, for Cowper’s belief in predestination...Johnson believed that living is striving, and that he who strives hardest has the deepest satisfaction; ---p 39

Those of her (JA) character who take life easily and lightly achieve success for themselves, are commonly just those who are shown to be shallowest, least likely to achieve enduring happiness for themselves or for others.....Captain Tilney...Willoughby...Wickham...Crawford...Churchill. Those who achieve at least the prospect of true happiness are often those who begin with the worst prospects and have to undergo the greatest difficulties. The obvious examples are the heroines of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion: Elinor Dashwood, burdened with a sense of responsibility, unlike her pretty, romantic sister Marianne; Fanny Price, burdened with the status of ‘poor relation’; Anne Elliot, who has ‘missed her chance’ and lost her looks. There is also the ‘hero’ of Sense and Sensibility, Edward Ferrars, Elinor’s lover,whose deep feelings and oppressed conscience dull any natural charm he may posses, in contrast to the facile and irresponsible Willoughby who is Marianne’s lover. ---p39

Johnson and conserbatibe reason:’Rasselas’

Rasselas. It is not a novel in the usual sense, but a moral fable, which sets out to show, not that human beings cannot be happy, but that which they instinctively pursue happiness they mistaken in supposing that it exists in any particular conditon of life. –p 41

Johnson and the art of the novel

Johnson believed that the nearer fictin came to life, the more it should serve the purpose of moral instruction. A novel that does not attempt moral discrimination is meaningless....a novel which attempt to distinguish only brilliance..... is harmful.—p44

His (Johnson) moral viewpoint was certainly close to Jane Austen’s. Among her characters, the Knightley brothers in Emma most closely embody his values.—p44

Cowper and Sensibility

Jane Austen’s work is thus suspended between the background influences of Johnson and Cowper, and to convey that the values of the former are represented most purely in the Knightley brothers, and those of the latter in Fanny Price....Johnson’s reason, Cowper’s faith in feeling, complement each other like the masculine and feminine principles of her art. –p 53

6 Literary Contemporaries: Isolation(隔离) and Involvement（插手）

Jane Austen was the first English novelist to discern(看见) its true potantiality and its limitations.---p 57

7 the 18^th Novel

The novel has always a social form in 2 spicial senses: it has concerned itself more closely than any other literary form with social problems, manners, and organization; and (at least in England) it has been the product of one particlular class ---the middle class. Other narrative forms, of course, have had affinities with one social class rather than another: the medieval high romance belonged to the aristocracy; the ballad, to the folk.... The novel, in the 19^th and 19^th centuries, was more distinctly the outcome of middle-class values and outlook.---p 59

Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731

Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761

Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745

Swift used irony extensively to expose the contrast between a man’s idea of himself as a socail being, and his appearance to a mind which chooses to ignore his social pretensions;---p 67

Henry Fielding, 1707-54

Fielding is writing about morality. ---p 70

Fanny Burney, 1752-1840

8 The Arts and the Social Order

Gilpin and picturesque

9 Women in Life and Literature

The predicament of the Jane Austen heroine

There are no satisfactory parents in Jane Austen’s novels. –p96

Part Three   The Art of Jane Austen

10 Characterization: Heroines and Heroes

This variety arises from the novelist’s use of 3 distinct ways of ‘learning’ people, each of them natural to the experience of non-fictional life. The 1^st is the way in which we learn ourselves, partly by self-discovery and partly through enrichment of relationship; the 2^nd is learning by the discovery of our misjudgments how to arrive at true judgments of those who strongly influence us; and the 3^rd is the way in which we register the characteristics of those for whom we do not deeply care, but with those idiosyncrasies(习惯) we have to live.

The 1^st category, and part of the 2^nd, relate to the heroines’ experience of themselves and to their experience of their lovers—the heroes; ... The rest of the 2^nd category—the subjects of midjudgment—are composed of what I choose to call the ‘prime antagonists’ to the heroine, since ‘villain’ does not seem appropriate to describe them. Thus General Tilney is the antagonist to Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; Willoughby to Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility; Wickham to Eliazbeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice; the Crawfords to Fanny Price in Mansfield Park; Frank Churchill to Emma Woodhouse ; and Mr. Eliot to Anne Eliot in Persuasion. ---p 104

The caricatures   漫画

The characters which belong to the 3^rd class .....labelling them ‘caricatures’,....p 104

Minor characters

In a novel a ‘distant’ character is one that remains in the background of the story, and must therefore be kept in a background perspective. A minor but exacting task for any novelist is to imbue such characters with enough life but not too much: if they have too little, the reader has the uncomfortable sense of a small but worrying blankness in the composition; if they have too much, they will distract attention from those who ought to be concentrating it. ---p 107

The heroines

The character of the heroine is not static(静止，不变的); it grows and unfolds, ....by critical self-discovery on the one hand, and on the other by the slow fruition of innate virtues. ....This ripening of the virtue is the ripening of the self; the heroines do not ‘possess’ their virtues but are the virtues. ---p 108

The Heroes

11 The Construction of the Novels:

The Fable of the Starling(八哥)

Sterne’s Sentimental Journey

Narrative construction

A Jane Austen novel proceeds in 2 phases. In the 1^st, the heroine is shown in her original circumstances: her family, natural or substituted; her circle of acquaintances; her economic advantages or disadvantages. ... In this phase the irony is cheerful and overt(公开的); .... the heroine surrounded by the bars of her cage. The 2^nd phase begins with the appearance of the character or characters whom I have termed in the previous section the ‘primary antagonists’—intriguers(密谋者) in every novel. –p 117

Marianne is the romantic heroine who wants to marry without deference to society’s prejudice, but her romantic lover plays her false because he loves money too much, and it is her prudent sister Elinor, and Elinor’s very unromantic lover who make the ‘romantic’ match while Marianne ends by marrying the safe and reliable Colonel Brandon. –p 119

Settings: the ritual entertainments

Outstanding among such occations is some kind of public assembly, usually a bringing to a climax unhappy if necessary cirses, in the heroin’e career. –p120

The meaning of the fable

见照片文件(八哥的故事与fanny 的处境)

12  Emma

Miss Bates is indeed a benign(善良的) bore to everybody, but she interferes with nobody; she has none of Emma’s worldliness and no self-regard.—p 129

Frank Churchill

She (Emma) is sure that Frank is drawn to herself, when all the time he is using her as a cover for Jane fairfax. ---p 134

Mr Knightley

More than any other male character in Jane Austen’s novels, Mr. Knightley seems to stand for an ideal in her conception of a civilized man of the class to which she belonged: practical but with deep feeling, robust but delicate in perception, energetically direct but with strong powers of restraint;----p 137

13  Jane Austen’s Place in English Fiction

In Jane Austen, the social is perfect, but the passions are only implied; in Charlette Bronte the surface is often crude or sketchy, but the passions have the force of immediacy. –p 140

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/austen/index.html