About Jane Austen: THE IMPRESSION of the condition of the Church of England in the eighteenth century which is conveyed by the character and writings of Laurence Sterne receives some necessary modification from a study of the life and works of Jane Austen. Her father, the Reverend George Austen, held the two rectories of Deane and Steventon in Hampshire, having been appointed to them by the favor of a cousin and an uncle. He thus belonged to the gentry, and it seems likely that he entered the church more as a profession than a vocation. He considered that he fulfilled his functions by preaching once a week and administering the sacraments; and though he does not seem to have been a man of spiritual gifts, the decent and dignified performance of these formal duties earned him the reputation of a model pastor. His abundant leisure he occupied in farming the rectory acres, educating his children, and sharing the social life of his class. The environment of refined worldliness and good breeding thus indicated was that in which his daughter lived, and which she pictured in her books. Jane Austen was born at Steventon on December 16, 1775, the youngest of seven children. She received her education—scanty enough, by modern standards—at home. Besides the usual elementary subjects, she learned French and some Italian, sang a little, and became an expert needle-woman. Her reading extended little beyond the literature of the eighteenth century, and within that period she seems to have cared most for the novels of Richardson and Miss Burney, and the poems of Cowper and Crabbe. Dr. Johnson, too, she admired, and later was delighted with both the poetry and prose of Scott. The first twenty-five years of her life she spent at Steventon; in 1801 she moved with her family to Bath, then a great center of fashion; after the death of her father in 1805, she lived with her mother and sister, first at Southampton and then at Chawton; finally she took lodgings at Winchester to be near a doctor, and there she died on July 18, 1817, and was buried in the cathedral. Apart from a few visits to friends in London and elsewhere, and the vague report of a love affair with a gentleman who died suddenly, there is little else to chronicle in this quiet and uneventful life. But quiet and uneventful though her life was, it yet supplied her with material for half a dozen novels as perfect of their kind as any in the language. While still a young girl she had experimented with various styles of writing, and when she completed "Pride and Prejudice" at the age of twenty-two, it was clear that she had found her appropriate form. This novel, which in many respects she never surpassed, was followed a year later by "Northanger Abbey," a satire on the "Gothic" romances then in vogue; and in 1809 she finished "Sense and Sensibility," begun a dozen years before. So far she had not succeeded in having any of her works printed; but in 1811 "Sense and Sensibility" appeared in London and won enough recognition to make easy the publication of the others. Success gave stimulus, and between 1811 and 1816, she completed "Mansfield Park," "Emma," and "Persuasion." The last of these and "Northanger Abbey" were published posthumously. The most remarkable characteristic of Jane Austen as a novelist is her recognition of the limits of her knowledge of life and her determination never to go beyond these limits in her books. She describes her own class, in the part of the country with which she was acquainted; and both the types of character and the events are such as she knew from first-hand observation and experience. But to the portrayal of these she brought an extraordinary power of delicate and subtle delineation, a gift of lively dialogue, and a peculiar detachment. She abounds in humor, but it is always quiet and controlled; and though one feels that she sees through the affectations and petty hypocrisies of her circle, she seldom becomes openly satirical. The fineness of her workmanship, unexcelled in the English novel, makes possible the discrimination of characters who have outwardly little or nothing to distinguish them; and the analysis of the states of mind and feeling of ordinary people is done so faithfully and vividly as to compensate for the lack of passion and adventure. She herself speaks of the "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work," and, in contrast with the broad canvases of Fielding or Scott, her stories have the exquisiteness of a fine miniature. For all the girls who are fantasize love and fortune, Mr Darcy would certainly be the one. Here comes the famous Mr Gold Smith's comments:

AS we should expect from such a life, Jane Austen's view of the world is genial, kindly, and, we repeat, free from anything like cynicism. It is that of a clear-sighted and somewhat satirical onlooker, loving what deserves love, and amusing herself with the foibles, the self-deceptions, the affectations of humanity. Refined almost to fastidiousness, she is hard upon vulgarity; not, however, on good-natured vulgarity, such as that of Mrs. Jennings in "Sense and Sensibility," but on vulgarity like that of Miss Steele, in the same novel, combined at once with effrontery and with meanness of soul....
To sentimentality Jane Austen was a foe. Antipathy to it runs through her works. She had encountered it in the romances of the day, such as the works of Mrs. Radcliffe and in people who had fed on them. What she would have said if she had encountered it in the form of Rousseauism we can only guess. The solid foundation of her own character was good sense, and her type of excellence as displayed in her heroines is a woman full of feeling, but with her feelings thoroughly under control. Genuine sensibility, however, even when too little under control, she can regard as lovable. Marianne in "Sense and Sensibility" is an object of sympathy, because her emotions, though they are ungoverned and lead her into folly, are genuine, and are matched in intensity by her sisterly affection. But affected sentiment gets no quarter....
Jane Austen had, as she was sure to have, a feeling for the beauties of nature. She paints in glowing language the scenery of Lyme. She speaks almost with rapture of a view which she calls thoroughly English, though never having been out of England she could hardly judge of its scenery by contrast. She was deeply impressed by the sea, on which, she says, "all must linger and gaze, on their first return to it, who ever deserves to look on it at all." But admiration of the picturesque had "become a mere jargon," from which Jane Austen recoiled. One of her characters is made to say that he likes a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; that he prefers tall and flourishing trees to those which are crooked and blasted; neat to ruined cottages, snug farmhouses to watchtowers, and a troop of tidy, happy villagers to the finest banditti in the world....
Jane Austen held the mirror up to her time, or at least to a certain class of the people of her time; and her time was two generations and more before ours. We are reminded of this as we read her works by a number of little touches of manners and customs belonging to the early part of the century, and anterior to the rush of discovery and development which the century has brought with it. There are no railroads, and no lucifer matches. It takes you two days and a half, even when you are flying on the wings of love or remorse, to get from Somersetshire to London. A young lady who has snuffed her candle out has to go to bed in the dark. The watchman calls the hours of the night. Magnates go about in chariots and four with outriders, their coachmen wearing wigs. People dine at five, and instead of spending the evening in brilliant conversation as we do they spend it in an unintellectual rubber of whist, or a round game. Life is unelectric, untelegraphic; it is spent more quietly and it is spent at home. If you are capable of enjoying tranquillity, at least by way of occasional contrast to the stir and stress of the present age, you will find in these tales the tranquillity of a rural neighborhood and a little country town in England a century ago....
That Jane Austen held up the mirror to her time must be remembered when she is charged with want of delicacy in dealing with the relations between the sexes, and especially in speaking of the views of women with regard to matrimony. Women in those days evidently did consider a happy marriage as the best thing that destiny could have in store for them. They desired it for themselves and they sought it for their daughters. Other views had not opened out to them; they had not thought of professions or public life, nor had it entered into the mind of any of them that maternity was not the highest duty and the crown of womanhood. Apparently they also confessed their aims to themselves and to each other with a frankness which would be deemed indelicate in our time. The more worldly and ambitious of them sought in marriage rank and money, and avowed that they did, whereas they would not avow it at the present day. Gossip and speculation on these subjects were common and more unrefined than they are now, and they naturally formed a large part of the amusement of the opulent and idle class from which Jane Austen's characters were drawn. Often, too, she is ironical; the love of irony is a feature of her mind, and for this also allowance must be made. She does not approve or reward matchmaking or husband-hunting. Mrs. Jennings, the great matchmaker in "Sense and Sensibilty," is also a paragon of vulgarity. Mrs. Norris's matchmaking in "Mansfield Park" leads to the most calamitous results. Charlotte Lucas in "Pride and Prejudice," who unblushingly avows that her object is a husband with a good income, gets what she sought, but you are made to see that she has bought it dear....
The life which Jane Austen painted retains its leading features, and is recognized by the reader at the present day with little effort of the imagination. It is a life of opulent quiet and rather dull enjoyment, physically and morally healthy compared with that of a French aristocracy, though without much of the salt of duty; a life uneventful, exempt from arduous struggles and devoid of heroism, a life presenting no materials for tragedy and hardly an element of pathos, a life of which matrimony is the chief incident, and the most interesting objects are the hereditary estate and the heir.
Such a life could evidently furnish no material for romance. It could furnish materials only for that class of novel which corresponds to sentimental comedy. To that class all Jane Austen's novels belong.—From "Life of Jane Austen," in "Great Writers," 1890.

to be continue......