Pride and Prejudice Brief Life Story Jane Austen1775

Pride and Prejudice

Brief Life Story • • • Jane Austen(1775 -1817) was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father, Rev. George Austen, was a rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight. The first 25 years of her life Jane spent in Hampshire. On her father's unexpected retirement, the family sold off everything, including Jane's piano, and moved to Bath. Jane, aged twenty-five, and Cassandra, her elder sister, aged twenty-eight, were considered by contemporary standards confirmed old maid, and followed their parents. Jane was mostly tutored at home, but she received a broader education than many women of her time. She never married, but her social life was active and she had suitors and romantic dreams. Jane Austen started to write for family amusement as a child. Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787. Very shy about her writing, she wrote on small pieces of paper that she slipped under the desk plotter if anyone came into the room. Jane Austen's father supported his daughter's writing aspirations and tried to help her get a publisher. After her father’s death in 1805, she lived with her sister and hypochondriac mother in Southampton and moved in 1809 to a large cottage in the village of Chawton and remained there the rest of her life.

Jane Austen’s House at Chawton

Jane Austen’s Major Works (in order of publication) • • • Sense and Sensibility (1811) Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mansfield Park (1814) Emma (1816) Northanger Abbey (1818) Persuasion (1818)

Britain in Austen’s Time • Europe is submerged in warfare throughout most of the decade by the struggle against the ambitions of Napoleon to unite the continent under French rule. Two of Austen’s brothers, Frank and Charles, entered the British Navy and fought in the Napoleonic Wars. • In the early 19 th C, a woman’s education differed greatly from that of a man. While boys attended boarding schools and studied Latin, mathematics and science, girls were schooled at home by governesses, focusing on fine arts, writing, reading and sewing.

Britain in Austen’s Time • Because of a lack of professions for women to enter and become self-supporting, few women could afford to remain single in the early 1800 s. Most women elected to marry rather than depend on other family members for financial support. • The British Government maintained a strict control over any ideas or opinions that seemed to support the revolution in France. Prime Minister William Pitt suspended the right of habeas corpus, passed laws against public criticism of government policies and suppressed working-class trade unions. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution permanently changed the British economy.

The “Landed Gentry” • The Industrial Revolution also created a large wealthy class and an even larger middle class. • These are the characters in Austen’s novels: the ‘landed gentry’ who have earned their property, not by inheriting it from their aristocratic ancestors, but by purchasing it with their new wealth. • They have few of the manners and graces of the aristocracy and, like the Collinses, are primarily concerned with their own futures in their own little worlds.

English Regency Society • Because of periodic bouts of madness, King George III relinquished power to his son the Prince Regent. • The Prince Regent was widely known as a man of dissolute morals, and his example was followed by many of society’s leading figures. • Young men regularly went to universities not to learn, but to see and be seen, to drink, gamble, race horses and spend money. • George Wickham and Lydia Bennet are examples of the immoral behavior in Regency society.

Pride and Prejudice First published in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has consistently been Jane Austen's most popular novel. It portrays life in the genteel rural society of the day, and tells of the initial misunderstandings and later mutual enlightenment between Elizabeth Bennet (whose liveliness and quick wit have often attracted readers) and the haughty Darcy. The title Pride and Prejudice refers (among other things) to the ways in which Elizabeth and Darcy first view each other. The original version of the novel was written in 1796 -1797 under the title First Impressions, and was probably in the form of an exchange of letters.

Comment on the opening sentence of the novel: It is a truth universally acknowledged , that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. » It briskly introduces the arrival of Mr. Bingley at Netherfield Park, the event that sets the novel in motion; » This sentence also offers a miniature sketch of the entire plot, which concerns itself with the pursuit of “single men in possession of a good fortune” by various female characters. The preoccupation with socially advantageous marriage in the 19 th century England society manifests itself here, because in claiming that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, the narrator reveals that the reverse is also true: a single woman, whose socially prescribed options are quite limited, is in ( perhaps desperate ) want of a husband. » Rhetorically speaking, the sentence is an irony. There is an ironic difference between the formal manner of the statement and the ultimate meaning of the sentence.