Abstract
Leo Tolstoy’s opening line for Anna Karenina, that all happy families are alike, cannot apply to Jane Austen’s family. She is unique, and her family must be so too. But the particular quality of happiness in the large, lively, healthy, intelligent Austen family may surprise modern readers, used to stories of separation, divorce, drug and alcohol abuse, and all the other taxes upon contemporary life. Like Elizabeth Bennet, the Austens seem to have made it their family business to be satisfied, and it was their temper to be happy (PP, 239). Most of them were resilient and united in adversity when it came, affectionate and cheerful in prosperity. No other writer’s childhood comes to mind that can bear comparison to hers for love, warmth, encouragement, security and sanity.
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Notes
Hodge, The Double Life of JA; Halperin, The Life of JA (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
See Tucker; Honan, JA; her Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987); and Life (2).
Hughes, A London Family, 1870–1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 33.
F.C. K[night], ‘Aunt Jane’, Cornhill Magazine, 163 (1947/8), p. 72.
Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Three Austen Family Letters’, Notes and Queries (1985), p. 329. Henry had been baptised on 8 June.
Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), p. 16.
R.W. Chapman, ‘JA’s friend Mrs Barrett’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1949), 172–3. See also Aspects, pp. 85–6.
Thomas Dyche, A Guide to the English Tongue (London: J. Bruce, D. Burnet, R. Hopper, R. Pennington, L. Martin, 1790), pp. 158, 159.
Dyche, Guide (London: Sam. Butler, Holbourn, 1710), p. 126. Margaret Weedon has discussed these lines and their many eighteenth-century reprints in ‘NA’, TLS (26 Nov. 1982), p. 1311.
Madame d’Arblay, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 3 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), 2: 123.
‘Introduction’, in Frances Beer (ed.) The Juvenilia of JA and Charlotte Brontë (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), p. 19.
For extended analyses of JA’s reading, see Mary Lascelles’ splendid chapter, ‘Reading and Response’, in JA and Her Art (1939; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 41–83, and
Margaret Anne Doody’s excellent ‘JA’s Reading’, in J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz and Brian Southam (eds), The JA Companion (New York: Macmillan. 1986), pp. 347–63.
John McAleer has argued that ‘Internal evidence enables us to identify more than 50 works familiar to the author of the juvenilia’, but he tends to stretch the evidence (‘What a Biographer Can Learn about JA from her Juvenilia’, in J. David Grey, (ed.), JA’s Beginnings: the Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989). Grey’s collection will hereafter be cited as IA’s Beginnings.
David Spring, ‘Interpreters of JA’s Social World’, in JA: New Perspectives, Women & Literature, N.S. 3 (1983), p. 60.
Terry Lovell’s term ‘lesser gentry’ to describe the Austen’s class seems equally acceptable but does not underline the group’s marginality — oddly enough, for Lovell sees the lesser gentry as particularly threatened: ‘Squeezed between the rising capitalist tenant-farmer and the upper gentry’, ‘JA and the Gentry’, in Diana Laurenson (ed.), The Sociology of Literature: Applied Studies (Keele: Sociological Review Monographs 26, 1978), p. 21.
Robert Bearman, ‘Henry Austen and the Cubbington Living’, Persuasions No. 10 (1988), p. 23.
For George Austen, see Tucker, pp. 25, 27, 31. For Edward, see Tucker, pp. 122–3. For Mrs Austen’s connection to the founder of St John’s, see Tucker, p. 63. For the value of the Cubbington Living, see Bearman, ‘Henry Austen and the Cubbington living’, p. 24. For the Leigh Perrots, see Tucker pp. 92–3, 95. For Henry’s losses, see Tucker, p. 146, and for the Steventon living, see Maggie Lane, JA’s Family through Five Generations (London: Robert Hale, 1984), p. 196.
See especially Litz, JA: a Study of Her Artistic Development (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 14, also 6;
Lascelles, JA and Her Art (1939; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 55, 71–2.
B. C. Southam dates ‘Lesley Castle’ in 1792 using the date given for the first letter, 3 Jan. 1792 (Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts [London: Oxford University Press, 1964], p. 15). But ‘Lesley Castle’ is transcribed between works dated 13 June 1790 and 26 Nov. 1791. Austen may have used the almanac for 1790 or 1791 in composing it; the almanac for 1792 does not work.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their influential study The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), argue that the powerful women in JA’s juvenilia underscore the limitations women face within society. In my view, the juvenilia as well as the novels explore and celebrate possibility for women (within the constraints of society) rather than confinement.
Richard Whately, unsigned review of NA and P, Quarterly Review 24 (1821), pp. 352–76; rpt.
B.C. Southam (ed.), JA: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 101.
For accounts of university expenses, see Christopher Wordsworth, Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1874), p. 414: he quotes a 1760 source that asserts ‘that 80l. per annum was enough, but a gentleman-commoner spent 200l’.
See especially Claudia L. Johnson, JA: Women, Politics, and the Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
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© 1991 Jan Fergus
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Fergus, J. (1991). Background and Literary Apprenticeship, 1775–1793. In: Jane Austen. Macmillan Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21665-9_2
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