STONELEIGH ABBEY, Ashow - 1000377 | Historic England". historicengland.org.uk . Retrieved 26 November 2023.

Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters. [64] Jane Austen is now on Britain's 10 pound note". ABC News. 14 September 2017 . Retrieved 4 December 2019. The original is unsigned but was believed by the family to have been made by Austen's sister Cassandra and remained in the family until 1920 with a signed sketch by Cassandra. The original sketch, according to relatives who knew Jane Austen well, was not a good likeness. [1] Early on, a farmer, Robert Martin, is asking Harriet to marry him, only to have his proposition rejected, but because Emma Woodhouse had interfered and indeed transformed the expectations of the young protégée to the extent that later on, the latter would have so high hopes as to think and hope much beyond her possibilities – remember the Capital documentary, it was Impossible for the rich to consort with the poor or maybe better said, with those of ‘lower birth’, they could marry a destitute duchesse, but class counted for everything – and even think she could be the spouse of George Knightley.

Jane Austen writes extensively about this in various settings in her works, and offers much light to guide people - not only young women but men and women of all ages - with good counsel. This is her most popular work and most famous one, and with good reason.

Gilson, David. "Editions and Publishing History". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0. 135–139 Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. [167] Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, [168] who grouped Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. [169] The first academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. [161] The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France. [161] In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works. [170] The scant biographical information about Austen comes from her few surviving letters and sketches her family members wrote about her. [4] Only about 160 of the approximately 3,000 letters Austen wrote have survived and been published. Cassandra Austen destroyed the bulk of the letters she received from her sister, burning or otherwise destroying them. She wanted to ensure that the "younger nieces did not read any of Jane's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members". [5] In the interest of protecting reputations from Jane's penchant for honesty and forthrightness, Cassandra omitted details of illnesses, unhappiness and anything she considered unsavoury. [6] Important details about the Austen family were elided by intention, such as any mention of Austen's brother George, whose undiagnosed developmental challenges led the family to send him away from home; the two brothers sent away to the navy at an early age; or wealthy Aunt Leigh-Perrot, arrested and tried on charges of larceny. [7] The period since World War II has seen a diversity of critical approaches to Austen, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. [173] The divide has widened between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and academic judgements. [174] In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Austen among the greatest Western writers of all time. [175] After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister 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 to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility. [70]Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies. Her novels have also inspired many films, including 1940's Pride and Prejudice, 1995's Sense and Sensibility and 2016's Love & Friendship.

Rajan, Rajeswari. "Critical Responses, Recent". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 101–10. Upon the whole, Mr. Parker was evidently an amiable family man, fond of wife, children, brothers and sisters, and generally kind-hearted; liberal, gentlemanlike, easy to please; of a sanguine turn of mind, with more imagination than judgement. And Mrs. Parker was as evidently a gentle, amiable, sweet-tempered woman, the properest wife in the world for a man of strong understanding but not of a capacity to supply the cooler reflection which her own husband sometimes needed; and so entirely waiting to be guided on every occasion that whether he was risking his fortune or spraining his ankle, she remained equally useless." Southam, B.C. "Criticism, 1870–1940". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0. 102–109 Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. ISBN 0-8109-3285-7. The Austens took up temporary residence at the nearby Deane rectory until Steventon, a 16th-century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767. [24] Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months. [25] Steventon Steventon parsonage, as depicted in A Memoir of Jane Austen, was in a valley and surrounded by meadows. [10]

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From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. [145] Le Faye (2014), xx–xxi, xxvi; Fergus (2005), 8–9; Sutherland (2005), 16, 18–19, 20–22; Tomalin (1997), 182, 199, 254. Austen began a second novel, First Impressions (later published as Pride and Prejudice), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite". [71] At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. [72] Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility. [73] In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), Eliza de Feuillide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. [74] The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life. [74]