Love and friendship

Her characters are three-dimensional: Her world of reality is never disturbed for all its romances, elopements and dejection because of the convincing reality of her characters. Her characters are three-dimensional portraying various human traits.  Collins doesn’t commit suicide when her proposal is rejected by Elizabeth, but settles down with Charlotte. Darcy shows his unexpected trait after his proposal is rejected. The psychological and realistic portrayal of her characters is what makes them according to David Ceil, ‘Three-dimensional’. The characters come alive in flesh and blood as it were because of their realistic portrayal. Jane Austen reveals her characters dramatically through their conversations, their actions, and their letters or gradually through a variety of point of view and this adds to their three-dimensional effects.

Her authorship was announced to the world at large by her brother Henry, who supervised the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. There was no recognition at the time that regency England had lost its keenest observer and sharpest analyst; no understanding that a miniaturist (as she maintained that she was and as she was then seen), a “merely domestic” novelist, could be seriously concerned with the nature of society and the quality of its culture; no grasp of Jane Austen as a historian of the emergence of regency society into the modern world. During her lifetime there had been a solitary response in any way adequate to the nature of her achievement: Sir Walter Scott’s review of Emma in the Quarterly Review for March 1816, where he hailed this “nameless author” as a masterful exponent of “the modern novel” in the new realist tradition. After her death, there was for long only one significant essay, the review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in the Quarterly for January 1821 by the theologian Richard Whately. Together, Scott’s and Whately’s essays provided the foundation for serious criticism of Jane Austen: their insights were appropriated by critics throughout the 19th century. Many of the readers echo contemporary reviews of Austen’s work by commenting upon the novels’ faithfulness to ordinary life. A Lady Gordon gives one of the most detailed comments of this kind, about Mansfield Park:In most novels you are amused for the time with a set of Ideal People whom you never think of afterwards or whom you the least expect to meet in common life, whereas in Miss A—‘s works, & especially in MP. you actually live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family; & the scenes are so exactly descriptive, so perfectly natural, that there is scarcely an Incident or conversation, or a person that you are not inclined to imagine you have at one time or other in your Life been a witness to, born a part in, & been acquainted with.Most readers who comment on Austen’s ‘naturalness’ do so favourably, but a couple regard it as a failing: Mrs Guiton, for example, ‘thought [Emma] too natural to be interesting’. These differences in opinion reflect late 18th and early 19th-century debates about the purpose of novels and novel-reading. Novels at this time usually featured exaggerated characters and events, and were highly sentimental or dramatic in tone. Austen’s focus on everyday life therefore marks a major development in the history of the novel. The ‘Opinions’ show that Austen’s immediate family disagreed over the relative merits of her novels. Her sister Cassandra liked Emma ‘better than P&P – but not so well as M.P.’ while her mother found the same novel ‘more entertaining than MP – but not so interesting as P&P’. While most of the comments are positive, Austen recorded the bad as well as the good. Mr Cockerelle ‘liked [Emma] so little, that Fanny would not send me his opinion’; Mrs Augusta Bramstone ‘owned that she thought S&S – and P&P downright nonsense… having finished the 1st vol. [of Mansfield Park] flattered herself she had got through the worst’.

Jane Austen’s voice in the ‘Opinions’

There is only one explicit authorial comment in the ‘Opinions’: in response to Miss Isabella Herries being ‘convinced that I had meant Mrs & Miss Bates for some acquaintance of theirs’, Austen writes that they are ‘People whom I never heard of before’.However, some of the opinions (for example, those of Mrs Bramstone, Mrs Augusta Bramstone, Miss Sharpe and Mrs Digweed) sound so much like something Austen’s comic characters might say that one suspects a degree of mockery in her portrayal of them. Such opinions also reaffirm the likelihood that she was using her own observations of life around her as material for her fiction. A Memoir of Jane Austen is a biography of the novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817) published in 1869 by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. A second edition was published in 1871 which included previously unpublished Jane Austen writings.^[1] A family project, the biography was written by James Edward Austen-Leigh but owed much to the recollections of Jane Austen's many relatives. However, it was the decisions of her sister, Cassandra Austen, to destroy many of Jane's letters after her death that shaped the material available for the biography.

Austen-Leigh described his "dear Aunt Jane" domestically, as someone who was uninterested in fame and who only wrote in her spare time. However, the manuscripts appended to the second edition suggest that Jane Austen was intensely interested in revising her manuscripts and was perhaps less content than Austen-Leigh described her. The Memoir does not attempt to unreservedly tell the story of Jane Austen's life. Following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public, but family members disagreed over just how much should be revealed, for example, regarding Austen's romantic relationships.

The Memoir introduced the public to the works of Jane Austen, generating interest in novels which only the literary elite had read up until that point. It remained the primary biographical work on the author for over half a century.^[ A Memoir of Jane Austen is a biography of the novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817) published in 1869 by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. A second edition was published in 1871 which included previously unpublished Jane Austen writings.^[1] A family project, the biography was written by James Edward Austen-Leigh but owed much to the recollections of Jane Austen's many relatives. However, it was the decisions of her sister, Cassandra Austen, to destroy many of Jane's letters after her death that shaped the material available for the biography.Austen-Leigh described his "dear Aunt Jane" domestically, as someone who was uninterested in fame and who only wrote in her spare time. However, the manuscripts appended to the second edition suggest that Jane Austen was intensely interested in revising her manuscripts and was perhaps less content than Austen-Leigh described her. The Memoir does not attempt to unreservedly tell the story of Jane Austen's life. Following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public, but family members disagreed over just how much should be revealed, for example, regarding Austen's romantic relationships.

The Memoir introduced the public to the works of Jane Austen, generating interest in novels which only the literary elite had read up until that point. It remained the primary biographical work on the author for over half a century.^[