- Early Drawing of Jane Austen - Nelson's Enclyclopaedia
Lovers of Jane Austen’s novels know that her life and times have inspired millions of words covering her birth in December 1775 until her demise in July 1817. Yet this most well known author produced only six well-known novels in her life span, all of which were written and published in the last seven years of her life. Generations of readers have been charmed during the almost two hundred years following her death. Her books rarely go out of fashion and many have been made into plays and films.
Jane Austen's Early Years
Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, Rector of Steventon seemed happy enough with his new baby daughter, his seventh child, saying in a letter to his sister-in-law dated December 1775 "We have now another girl, a present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion. She is to be Jenny…" However Jane – for she was never, at least after infancy, known as Jenny – was welcomed into the family every bit as warmly as her parents’ older children.
Reverend Austen and Jane’s mother, Cassandra, (nee Leigh), provided a comfortable upbringing for their large family of eight children (their second son, born with mental problems lived with a carer in nearby village). Their lives in the large country rectory at Steventon in Hampshire were within a settled well-ordered hierarchical society. We almost forget that with King George III on the throne through Jane’s entire life, there were huge military uncertainties in Britain and revolutionary France, little of which appear in her novels.
From her earliest teenage years until a few months before her death, Jane was engaged in writing fiction. After her family, it was the most important thing in her life. As early as 1787, Jane began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her family's amusement. In later years, she made "fair copies" of 29 of these early works binding them into notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia, containing pieces originally written between 1787 and 1793.
Oliver Goldsmith's History of England
Jane's History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764). As she grew into adulthood, Jane continued to live at her parents' home, carrying out those activities normal for women of her age and social standing. She regularly attended church, socialised with friends and neighbours, and read novels – often of her own composition - aloud with her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall and state in letups that she enjoyed dancing.
In 1793, the author began writing a short play, later entitled Sir Charles Grandison or The Happy Man, a comedy in six acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgments of Samuel Richardson’s contemporary novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). During 1789, Jane made her decision to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort". Between 1793 and 1795, Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work.
Jane Austen's Earliest Published Novels
After finishing Lady Susan, Austen attempted her first full-length novel—Elinor and Marianne. Her elder sister Cassandra later remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way of knowing how much of the original draft survived in the novel published in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility. At this time, her books did not carry the author’s name. Most of Jane’s work was created at Chawton in Hampshire, a place she lived from 1809 and where the present day Museum is located.
Back to the Future - a ‘modern’ Regency Ball
Last month, a charity Regency Ball took place in the magnificent Hylands House close to the county town of Chelmsford in Essex. Several hundred people donned Regency costume to dance the night away to authentic music and dances of early 19th century. It was a simply wonderful evening of which Jane Austen would certainly approved. Related article
Sources Tomalin,Claire Jane Austen - A Life (1979)- Jane Austen (1912) Nelson's Encyclopaedia
