An Analysis Of Jane Austen And Her Novels

This thesis is an attempt at a more thorough analysis of Jane Austen (1775-1817), as a writer and a woman, and her six completed novels: Sense and sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger A bbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818).Critics accuse Jane Austen of being obsessed with money and rich relations. But both are a necessity in the society to which she belongs. From this sense, Austen is a realistic novelist who has created the first scale of universally acknowledged British realistic novels in the nineteenth century. And all her works show a recognizable standard of values. This thesis consists of three major parts besides the introduction and conclusion.The first is about Jane Austen's personal experiences and its influence on her novels. As a writer whose chosen field is "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village", Jane Austen has never stepped outside her own-imposed limits. An attempt is made to analyze the influence of Austen's personal experiences on her writing from three aspects-homes and environment, sibling love in Austen's family, and Austen's love life-since these three make up her life of circle.The second part discusses that Jane Austen's fiction is the portrayal of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries of England. Her works actually reflect the social history, the economic realities as well as the women's social status of Austen's day.In the third part the author points out that Austen's viewpoints of marriage can be classified into two stages. Marriage, in Austen's early writing-represented by Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey, etc., involves money as much as love. She lauds sensible, spirited, morally independent womenwho win a rational marriage of both love and money. In her latter writing-represented by Persuasion, Austen advocates romantic marriage in which emotion is superior to sense. She gives several opinions that are different from the previous novels, such as the romantic view of marriage, the most ideal family model and the spirit of anti-tradition.Based on the analysis above, this thesis concludes that Jane Austen, as a supreme prose stylist, actually has secured a lasting place in English literature. Her literary works and the films adapted from these works appeal to modern readers who desire her kind of love and marriage. In a word, Jane Austen is a genius that appeals to any generation.