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Overview
Austen, who published her novels anonymously, was
not a writer famous in her time, nor did she wish to be. Yet, her talent was the first to forge, from the eighteenth century
novel of external incident and internal sensibility, an art form that fully and faithfully presented a vision of real life
in a particular segment of the real world.
Her novels communicate a profound sense of the movement in English history--when
the old Georgian world of the eighteenth century was being carried uneasily and reluctantly into the new world of Regency
England, the Augustan world into the romantic.
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Stepping
Away from Tradition
Historically, the novels are
a challenge to the idea of society as a civilizing force and to the image of man's fulfillment as an enlightened social being.
They question the driving optimism of the period--that this, in the development of English society, was triumphantly the Age
of Improvement. Improvement was the leading spirit of Regency England, its self-awarded palm. Certainly it was unequaled as
a period of economic improvement, in the wake of the industrial revolution. The wartime economy accelerated this new prosperity.
Alongside this material improvement there was an air of self-conscious, self-congratulatory improvement in manners, in religious
zeal, in morality, in the popularization of science, philosophy, and the arts. It was the age of encyclopedias, displaying
the scope and categories of human knowledge in digestible form. Books and essays paraded "Improvement" in their titles.
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Writing From Experience
Ironically, one of Jane Austen's major achievements
in the novels is to have captured the total illusion of the gentry's vision, the experience of living in privileged isolation,
of being party to a privileged outlook, of belonging to a privileged community, whose distresses, such as they are, are private,
mild, and genteel. Each of the homes and neighborhoods is its own "little social commonwealth," a microcosm, the center of
a minute universe. The irony is implicit. The miniature issues of these little worlds, so realistic, so much the center of
the stage, vivid and magnified to the point of surrealism, imply another, larger world beyond: "the flourishing grandeur of
a Country, is but another term for the depression and misery of the people . . . to speak of the expensive luxury and refinements
of an age, is but, with cruel irony, to remind us how many myriads are destitute." John Thelwall, in The Peripatetic (1793),
was presenting a line of argument which was familiar to Jane Austen's audience and which the novels artfully exploit. "The
depression and misery" of the common people was a theme she could never handle directly; her way was to treat it by silent
implication . . .
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