Jane Austen A Political Author Of Her Time

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Birmingham (Department of English Studies), course: Independent Study, language: English, abstract: When Jane Austen wrote her major novels England was in a period of social upheaval provoked by the French Revolution (1789) and the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1817). The achievement of religious freedom in France after the Revolution led to powerful social, political and religious tensions in Great Britain. They reached its heyday when Jane Austen reached adulthood. Thus Austen wrote under the impression of the French Revolution and the resulting British reformist’s movements including the feminist movement that called for equal rights for women, the abolitionist movement that supported the abolition of the slave trade and other political reform societies, mostly generated by ordinary working people that declined patronage and called for parliamentary reform, political influence and social equality. The rising tensions among the British society generated the fear among conservatives and the nobility that the French Revolution might spread to Great Britain and deprive the ruling class of their power. One of the most famous anti-revolutionary writers was Edmund Burke. In 1791 he published his pamphletReflections on the Revolution in France,a response to the revolutionary movement, in which he rejected any kind of political reform modelled on the French Revolution. In 1791/92 Thomas Paine replied to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution with his pamphletThe Rights of Menwhere he called for social security of the poor, the abolition of The House of Lords, equal political rights for all men and the abolition of the slavery. The book was immediately banned by the British government and Thomas Paine escaped to France a short time after in 1792 and never returned to England again. Nevertheless, Paine’s book reached lots of readers and thus fuelled the political debates. The British government as well as the aristocracy and the landed gentry were deeply alarmed by the spread of revolutionary ideas and in order to stern revolutionary potential the government enforced that radical political leaders could be arrested without trial, the distribution of political pamphlets was forbidden, reformist societies eliminated and many reformists were driven into exile. Although the British ruling class managed to suppress a revolution as it had occurred in France they could not circumvent some political reforms that should change the political climate in England forever, like e.g. the universal suffrage with was achieved in 1829.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. So runs one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Setting the scene in Pride and Prejudice, it deftly introduces the novel's core themes of marriage, money, and social convention, themes that continue to resonate with readers over 200 years later. Jane Austen wrote six of the best-loved novels in the English language, as well as a smaller corpus of unpublished works. Her books pioneered new techniques for representing voices, minds, and hearts in narrative prose, and, despite some accusations of a blinkered domestic and romantic focus, they represent the world of their characters with unsparing clarity. Here, Tom Keymer explores the major themes throughout Austen's novels, setting them in the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which they emerge, and showing how they engage with social tensions in an era dominated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The Jane Austen who emerges is a writer shaped by the literary experiments and socio-political debates of her time, increasingly drawn to a fundamentally conservative vision of social harmony, yet forever complicating this vision through her disruptive ironies and satirical energy.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. So runs one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Setting the scene in Pride and Prejudice, it deftly introduces the novel's core themes of marriage, money, and social convention, themes that continue to resonate with readers over 200 years later. Jane Austen wrote six of the best-loved novels in the English language, as well as a smaller corpus of unpublished works. Her books pioneered new techniques for representing voices, minds, and hearts in narrative prose, and, despite some accusations of a blinkered domestic and romantic focus, they represent the world of their characters with unsparing clarity. Here, Tom Keymer explores the major themes throughout Austen's novels, setting them in the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which they emerge, and showing how they engage with social tensions in an era dominated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The Jane Austen who emerges is a writer shaped by the literary experiments and socio-political debates of her time, increasingly drawn to a fundamentally conservative vision of social harmony, yet forever complicating this vision through her disruptive ironies and satirical energy.

'A sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves.' Caroline Criado-Perez, Guardian Almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. Her novels don't confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers' enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don't read her properly - we haven't been reading her properly for 200 years. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical puts that right. In her first, brilliantly original book, Austen expert Helena Kelly introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects – feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution – at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason. Uncovering a radical, spirited and political engaged Austen, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical will encourage you to read Jane, all over again.

This exhilarating collection of essays is the product of a lifetime's engagement with Jane Austen's writing. They are modest, searching, wonderfully perceptive essays from which all lovers of Jane Austen, the most knowledgeable as well as those who have just discovered her, will have much to learn. They are essays that send us back to the novels with a renewed understanding of Jane Austen's extraordinary achievement. Prof. Richard Cronin, University of Glasgow This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction. Full of astute connections, these lively discussions hinge on the study of human behaviour – from family relationships to sickness and hypochondria – highlighting Austen’s artful literary techniques and her powers of human observation. Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader by (the late) Nora Bartlett is a brilliant contribution to the field of Jane Austen studies, both in its accessible style (which preserves the oral register of the original lectures), and in its foregrounding of the reader in a warm, compelling and incisive conversation about Austen’s works. As such, it will appeal widely to all lovers of Jane Austen, whether first-time readers, students or scholars.

"The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades."—Nina Auerbach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology "By looking at the ways in which Austen domesticates the gothic in Northanger Abbey, examines the conventions of male inheritance and its negative impact on attempts to define the family as a site of care and generosity in Sense and Sensibility, makes claims for the desirability of 'personal happiness as a liberating moral category' in Pride and Prejudice, validates the rights of female authority in Emma, and stresses the benefits of female independence in Persuasion, Johnson offers an original and persuasive reassessment of Jane Austen's thought."—Kate Fullbrook, Times Higher Education Supplement

A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring--how truly radical--a writer she was. In this fascinating, revelatory work, Helena Kelly--dazzling Jane Austen authority--looks past the grand houses, the pretty young women, past the demure drawing room dramas and witty commentary on the narrow social worlds of her time that became the hallmark of Austen's work to bring to light the serious, ambitious, deeply subversive nature of this beloved writer. Kelly illuminates the radical subjects--slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them--considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman "of information," fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. We see a writer who understood that the novel--until then seen as mindless "trash"--could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness.

Young ladies who have no financial or political power must take care of the genuine business of inventing material security'. Jane Austen's cynical silliness uncovers the stratagems, the affectation and the power inalienable in the battle of two altogether different sisters to accomplish respectability. Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comic drama of conduct in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne speak to these two qualities. Elinor's character is one of Augustan separation, while Marianne, an intense pupil of the Romantic Age, figures out how to control her energetic nature in light of a legitimate concern for survival.About AuthorOne of England's Most adored writer, Jane Austen composed six great books, for example, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and sensibility, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Her works were distributed secretly amid her life time. Jane Austen's work was eminent for its authenticity, funniness, and discourse on English social customs and society at the time Jane Austen composing was bolstered by her family, especially by her sibling, Henry and sister, Cassandra, who is accepted to have pulverized, at Jane Austen's ask for, her own correspondence after Jane Austen's demise motel 1817. Jane Austen's creation was uncovered by her nephew in a Memoir of Jane Austen, Published in 1869, and the artistic estimation of her work has since been perceived by researchers around the globe.