Sparknotes Jane Eyre

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Context
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, England, in 1775, where she lived for the first twenty-five years of her life. Her father, George Austen, was the rector
of the local parish and taught her largely at home. She began to write while in her teens and completed the original manuscript of Pride and Prejudice,
titled First Impressions, between 1796 and1797. A publisher rejected the manuscript, and it was not until 1809 that Austen began the revisions that would
bring it to its final form. Pride and Prejudice was published in January 1813, two years after Sense and Sensibility, her first novel, and it achieved a
popularity that has endured to this day. Austen published four more novels: Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Thelast two
were published in 1818, a year after her death.
During Austen’s life, however, only her immediate family knew of her authorship of these novels. At one point, she wrote behind a door that creaked
when visitors approached; this warning allowed her to hide manuscripts before anyone could enter. Though publishing anonymously prevented her from
acquiring an authorial reputation, it alsoenabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a female’s entrance into the public
sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity. Additionally, Austen may have sought anonymity because of the more general atmosphere of repression
pervading her era. As the Napoleonic Wars (1800–1815) threatened the safety of monarchies throughout Europe, government censorship ofliterature
proliferated.
The social milieu of Austen’s Regency England was particularly stratified, and class divisions were rooted in family connections and wealth. In her work,
Austen is often critical of the assumptions and prejudices of upper-class England. She distinguishes between internal merit (goodness of person) and
external merit (rank and possessions). Though she frequently satirizessnobs, she also pokes fun at the poor breeding and misbehavior of those lower on
the social scale. Nevertheless, Austen was in many ways a realist, and the England she depicts is one in which social mobility is limited and classconsciousness is strong.
Socially regimented ideas of appropriate behavior for each gender factored into Austen’s work as well. While social advancement for young men layin
the military, church, or law, the chief method of self-improvement for women was the acquisition of wealth. Women could only accomplish this goal
through successful marriage, which explains the ubiquity of matrimony as a goal and topic of conversation in Austen’s writing. Though young women of
Austen’s day had more freedom to choose their husbands than in the early eighteenth century,practical considerations continued to limit their options.
Even so, critics often accuse Austen of portraying a limited world. As a clergyman’s daughter, Austen would have done parish work and was certainly
aware of the poor around her. However, she wrote about her own world, not theirs. The critiques she makes of class structure seem to include only the
middle class and upper class; the lowerclasses, if they appear at all, are generally servants who seem perfectly pleased with their lot. This lack of interest
in the lives of the poor may be a failure on Austen’s part, but it should be understood as a failure shared by almost all of English society at the time.
In general, Austen occupies a curious position between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her favorite writer, whom sheoften quotes in her novels,
was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great model of eighteenth-century classicism and reason. Her plots, which often feature characters forging their respective
ways through an established and rigid social hierarchy, bear similarities to such works of Johnson’s contemporaries as Pamela, written by Samuel
Richardson. Austen’s novels also display an ambiguity about emotion and...