Today is Jane Austen's Birthday. Re-read her novels. You will likely be astonished if, like me, it has been some years since you picked them up. (My last time was reading them for the truly extraordinary Professor Rosenberg at Harvard in 1963.) The clarity of her style taken together with her splendid analytical skills make refreshing reads. BTW -- that's Jane Hathaway doing her best Jane above.
and as Mr. Kellor wrote on this occasion:
Jane Austen, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (1775). She is best known for her novels about women yearning to get married, including Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). But she never got married herself. She did fall in love as a young woman, but the man she loved had no money for marriage. Later, she got a proposal from an older wealthy gentleman. She said yes, but then found herself unable to sleep that night. In the morning she did something that was almost unheard of at the time: She told her fiance that she had changed her mind, because she did not love him.
Austen didn't seem to mind the single life. In her letters, she often wrote about the many women she knew suffering from and often dying from childbirth. Of her niece, who had just gotten pregnant for the second time, she wrote, "Poor animal, she will be worn out before she's thirty." In another letter, she wrote, "Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright — I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband."
She spent most of her life relatively poor and dependent on her older brothers. She decided to try publishing fiction in order to get herself some money. She wrote on a table in the family drawing room, and he asked that the squeak not be taken out of the swinging door because it gave her warning to hide her notebooks before someone entered the room. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility (1811), and it became a big success. Her other novels include Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), and today she is the only English-language novelist published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. All of her novels have been made into movies at least once in the last 20 years.
Austen didn't seem to mind the single life. In her letters, she often wrote about the many women she knew suffering from and often dying from childbirth. Of her niece, who had just gotten pregnant for the second time, she wrote, "Poor animal, she will be worn out before she's thirty." In another letter, she wrote, "Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright — I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband."
She spent most of her life relatively poor and dependent on her older brothers. She decided to try publishing fiction in order to get herself some money. She wrote on a table in the family drawing room, and he asked that the squeak not be taken out of the swinging door because it gave her warning to hide her notebooks before someone entered the room. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility (1811), and it became a big success. Her other novels include Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), and today she is the only English-language novelist published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. All of her novels have been made into movies at least once in the last 20 years.
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