Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

She-writers in English Literature of the 19th Century. Feministic literature. 
Jane Austen 
Jane Austen is quite different from any novelist before her, and an important part of the 
difference is that for many years she was not consciously writing for publication. Female writers 
were not unusual: indeed, many of the most notable writers of the thirty or so years before 
Austen were women – Clara Reeve, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney in particular.
In Austen’s own time, Maria Edgeworth established herself very significantly as a 
writer of small-scale, so-called ‘provincial’ novels, set in Ireland, at the time when the 
Three or four families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on 
(Jane Austen, Letters) 
Act of Union (1801) brought Ireland fully into the United Kingdom, in both a political 
and legal sense. Her Castle Rackrent (1800) is particularly significant, both as a regional novel 
and as an evocation of history, being set ‘before the year 1782’. Then we were all bustle in the 
house, which made me keep out of the way, for I walk slow and hate a bustle, but the house was 
all hurry-skurry, preparing for my new master. 
– Sir Murtagh, I forgot to notice, had no childer, so the Rackrent estate went to his 
younger brother – a young dashing officer – who came amongst us before I knew for the life of 
me whereabouts I was, in a gig or some of them things, with another spark along with him, and 
led horses, and servants, and dogs, and scarce a place to put any Christian of them into; for my 
late lady had sent all the featherbeds off before her, and blankets, and household linen, down to 
the very knife cloths, on the cars to Dublin, which were all her own, lawfully paid for out of her 
own money. – 
So the house was quite bare, and my young master, the moment ever he set foot in it out 
of his gig, thought all those things must come of themselves, I believe, for he never looked after 
any thing at all, but harum-scarum called for every thing as if we were conjurers, or he in a 
public-house. For my part, I could not bestir myself any how; I had been so used to my late 
master and mistress, all was upside down with me, and the new servants in the servants’ hall 
were quite out of my way; I had nobody to talk to, and if it had not been for my pipe and tobacco 
should, I verily believe, have broke my heart for poor Sir Murtagh.
‘The great Maria’, as she came to be called, was one of the best-known literary figures of 
her time, writing several more novels about Irish society, such as The Absentee (1812), and 
many books for children. But her reputation did not last long; and Jane Austen soon came to be 
regarded as the greatest woman writer of her time.

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What Jane Austen did – and no author before her had attempted it so successfully –was to 
apply the techniques of the novel to the acute observation of society in microcosm: ‘three or four 
families in a Country Village’ was ‘the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work’, she 
wrote in her letters. That her intentions were not small-scale, however, is clear from her next 
words – ‘so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’.
Jane Austen deliberately avoids effect, exaggeration and excess. Going against the trend 
of the novels of her time, she applies the microscope to human character and motivation, with no 
great didactic, moral, or satiric purpose, but with a gentle irony and perspicacity which make her 
novels unique, as representations of universal patterns of behaviour, and as documentation of an 
aspect of the provincial society of her time.
It was a time of war: and, in the history of the novel, it was the time when the Gothic 
novel was at its most popular. War is only touched upon slightly (for instance, the Battle of 
Trafalgar in 1805 is mentioned in Persuasion) but novels and reading are quite significant in 
Austen’s writing, especially Northanger Abbey.
Jane Austen was already writing in the early 1790s, as the debates raged on
Radicalism, women’s rights, and primitivism. The first versions of the novels now known 
as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice probably date from 1795–97; after The 
romantic period 1789–1832 several failed attempts, it was Sense and Sensibility which was her 
first novel to be published, in 1811, and this gave her the impetus, in the last few years of her 
life, to revise her earlier work and start writing again after a gap of some three or four years. 
Northanger Abbey was probably the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be completed, around 1798. 
It was actually sold to a publisher in 1803, but was only published, with thelate novel Persuasion, 
in 1818, the year after the writer’s death. Northanger Abbey gently satirises the 1790s 
enthusiasm for the Gothic novel, by contrasting day-to-day life with the imagined horrors of Ann 
Radcliffe’s work, which have had a considerable effect onthe impressionable heroine, Catherine 
Morland. The author’s distanced, slightly ironic observation of the heroine, and of the love 
intrigues in fashionable Bath, already displays the tone and the point of view which Austen was 
to refine in her later works, which are less obviously intended to ridicule and more concerned 
with acute depiction of character and interaction.
She continues to focus on young heroines: the contrasting Elinor (sense and self-control) 
and Marianne (sensibility and impulsiveness) in Sense and Sensibility; Elizabeth Bennet in Pride 
and Prejudice; Fanny Price in Mansfield Park; Emma in the novel that bears her name; and Anne 
Elliot in Persuasion. Sisters are often contrasted, and the closely worked out plots usually 
involve the twists and turns of emotion in the search for love, marriage, happiness and social 
status.
Where other writers had used the novel to create fictional models, to give moral 
examples, to ridicule manners and morals, to describe real or imagined worlds and ways of life, 
Jane Austen’s achievement was to create in each novel a fully realised and populated world, 
strictly limited in scope, such that the reader can observe – without being made to judge – a 
group of characters whose emotions are recognisable, whosefaults are human, whose traits are 
familiar. The ‘issues’ may seem small-scale, when compared to the wars being waged outside 
the limits of the village; but it is precisely the universality of the characters’ preoccupations that 
makes these issues, and their expression, attractive in a lasting way to a great many readers.

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When discussing Jane Austen’s work, critics tend to speak of her delicacy and irony, her 
femininity and her lack of ambition and scope. This is to undervalue her and to prettify a group 
of novels which are considerably more than ‘novels … about the gentry and addressed to the 
gentry’. Neither should she be seen as ‘typical’ of her age: the major artist is probably the least 
typical representative of any age. But Austen shows ‘the form and pressure of the time’ on a 
society which was undergoing many radical changes; the questions her characters face, ‘anti-
Jacobin’ though their conclusions may be, are just as significant as the questions of social class 
and Irish identity examined by MariaEdgeworth, the pursuit of truth in Godwin, and the anti-
aristocratic satire of Bage. Jane Austen too criticises the ‘gentry’: her characters stage an 
‘anarchic’ play in Mansfield Park (a play, incidentally, by Elizabeth Inchbald); she portrays an 
older order of values that is changing, at a time when the gap between the gentry and the poor is 
widening. Heryoung female characters, in search of the best prospect for marriage, end up 
marrying acountry clergyman or a landed gentleman. Only Anne Elliot breaks with this 
‘Cinderella’ tradition (which, for example, is the mainstay of Frances Burney’s novels) by 
marrying a sailor. But the choices, the options, are indicative: what Jane Austen emphasises 
iscommunity in microcosm, the search for order in a world beset by chaos, threatened on all 
sides, not only by war, or class division, but by such human fears as loneliness,uncertainty and 
failure.
Most writers of the Romantic period engage deeply in an ideological conflict between the 
past and the future. In many cases, the past wins – in Wordsworth and Scott, most notably. In her 
settling of plot in the future of marriage, Jane Austen is not succumbing to an ethos of the past, 
but is endeavouring to confront the realities of a difficult future, without taking recourse to the 
falsity of a comfortable happy ending.