Lecture 11

The Romantic Age

Plan:

1. Jane Austen

2. Percy Bysshe Shelley

3. George Gordon, Lord Byron

4. John Keats

JANE AUSTEN

Although fane Austen's career belongs chronolog­ically to the Romantic period (she was a contem­porary of Wordsworth and Coleridge), the spirit and the ideas embodied in her fiction hark back to the eighteenth century —to the brilliant satire of Alexander Pope and to the rational, commonsen-sical moral authority of Samuel Johnson. She was born at Steventon in Hampshire, a small town in southwest England where her father was rector of the church. "A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event," reflected Jane's brother Henry Austen in an 1818 "Biographical Notice" of his sister. Jane Austen's life does seem remarkably quiet and uneventful to us today. Yet in her private reading and writing and in her observation of social behavior, she devel­oped powers of subtle discrimination and shrewd perceptiveness. She referred to her own fiction as "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labor." In her modest way she became one of the two greatest English novelists of the period, Sir Walter Scott being the other.

Scott's own assessment of Jane Austen's achievement is telling: "The young lady had a tal­ent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with." Her earliest fic­tional ventures, written for her close friends and family before she was twenty, are full of charming and delicate comedy. In 1795 she began a first ver­sion of Sense and Sensibility; in 1796 of Pride and Prejudice; in 1797, or possibly earlier, of N onhanger Abbey. In the revised versions of these early novels, we can see her perfecting her skill at social comedy while moving in the direction of the pointed social satire and refined moral understand­ing characteristic of her later work: Mansfield Park (begun in 1811), Emma (begun in 1814), and Per­suasion (begun in 1815).

Jane Austen published most of her mature work while living at Chawton, a small village only a few miles away from her birthplace. She knew and wrote about fashionable resorts like Bath and Southampton but preferred to keep her distance from them. The modest redbrick house at Chaw­ton preserves very convincingly for present-day admirers the contrast between the appearance of her life and its inner character. Visitors to this house, like readers of her biography, sense the vitality and imagination that flourished within the well-bred serenity and restraint of her world. She died in Winchester, the ancient cathedral town of her native Hampshire. She is buried in the cathe­dral.

Jane Austen was popular all through the nine­teenth century and in the twentieth century has become almost a cult figure to many well-known authors. E. M. Forster in a famous essay describes himself as a "Jane Austenite" and says that she is his favorite author.