الموضوع
:
اعظم 100 كتاب في التاريخ: ما سر هذه العظمة؟- دراسة بحثية
عرض مشاركة واحدة
01-17-2013, 12:36 PM
المشاركة
297
ايوب صابر
مراقب عام سابقا
اوسمتي
مجموع الاوسمة
: 4
تاريخ الإنضمام :
Sep 2009
رقم العضوية :
7857
المشاركات:
12,766
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an
English
novelist
whose works of
romantic fiction
, set among the
landed gentry
, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in
English literature
. Her
realism
and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics.
[1]
Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English
landed gentry
.
[2]
She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer.
[3]
Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the
epistolary novel
which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth.
[B]
From 1811 until 1816, with the release of
Sense and Sensibility
(1811),
Pride and Prejudice
(1813),
Mansfield Park
(1814) and
Emma
(1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels,
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled
Sanditon
, but died before completing it.
Austen's works critique the
novels of sensibility
of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.
[4]
[C]
Her plots, though fundamentally comic,
[5]
highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.
[6]
Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's
A Memoir of Jane Austen
introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a
Janeite
fan culture.
Biographical information concerning Jane Austen is "famously scarce", according to one biographer.
[7]
Only some personal and family letters remain (by one estimate only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant),
[8]
and her sister
Cassandra
(to whom most of the letters were originally addressed) burned "the greater part" of the ones she kept and censored those she did not destroy.
[9]
Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral
Francis Austen
, Jane's brother.
[10]
Most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and reflects the family's biases in favour of "good quiet Aunt Jane". Scholars have unearthed little information since.
[7]
Life and career
Further information:
Timeline of Jane Austen
Family
Austen's parents, George Austen (1731–1805
), and his wife Cassandra (1739–1827), were members of substantial gentry families. George was descended from a family of woollen manufacturers, which had risen through the professions to the lower ranks of the landed gentry.
[12]
Cassandra was a member of the prominent
Leigh
family; they married on 26 April 1764 at Walcot Church in
Bath
.
[13]
From 1765 until 1801, that is, for much of Jane's life, George Austen served as the
rector
of the
Anglican
parishes
at
Steventon, Hampshire
,
[14]
and a nearby village. From 1773 until 1796, he supplemented this income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time who boarded at his home.
[15]
Austen's immediate family was large: six brothers — James (1765–1819), George (1766–1838),
Edward
(1768–1852), Henry Thomas (1771–1850),
Francis William (Frank)
(1774–1865),
Charles John
(1779–1852) — and one sister,
Cassandra Elizabeth
(Steventon, Hampshire, 9 January 1773 – 1845), who, like Jane, died unmarried.
Cassandra was Austen's closest friend and confidante throughout her life.
[16]
Of her brothers, Austen felt closest to Henry, who became a banker and, after his bank failed, an Anglican clergyman. Henry was also his sister's
literary agent
. A memorial plaque on her brother’s former home at 10 Henrietta Street, was unveiled on 29 April 1999 by actress
Amanda Root
, accompanied by Jane Austen’s donkey cart from Chawton. It was while staying here that Jane Austen wrote most of her best letters.
[17]
His large circle of friends and acquaintances in London included bankers, merchants, publishers, painters, and actors: he provided Austen with a view of social worlds not normally visible from a small parish in rural Hampshire.
[18]
-
George was sent to live with a local family at a young age because, as Austen biographer Le Faye describes it, he was "mentally abnormal and subject to fits".
-
He may also have been deaf and mute.
[19]
Charles and Frank served in
the navy, both rising to the rank of admiral.
-
Edward was adopted by his fourth cousin, Thomas Knight, inheriting Knight's estate and taking his name in 1812.
Early life and education
Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at
Steventon
rectory and publicly christened on 5 April 1776.
-
After a few months at home, her mother placed Austen with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby, who
nursed
and raised Austen for a year or eighteen months
-
In 1783, according to family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to
Oxford
to be educated by Mrs. Ann Cawley and they moved with her to
Southampton
later in the year.
-
Both girls caught
typhus
and Jane nearly died.
[
Austen was subsequently educated at home, until leaving for boarding school with her sister Cassandra early in 1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama.
-
By December 1786, Jane and Cassandra had returned home because the Austens could not afford to send both of their daughters to school
-
Jane and her sister caught typhus, with Jane nearly succumbing to the illness. After a short period of formal education cut short by financial constraints, they returned home and lived with the family from that time forward
.
-
In 1801 the Austens moved to Bath, where Mr. Austen died in 1805, leaving only Mrs. Austen, Jane and her sister Cassandra, to whom she was always deeply attached, to keep up the home; his sons were out in the world, the two in the navy, Francis William and Charles, subsequently rising to admiral's rank.
Austen acquired the remainder of her education by reading books, guided by her father and her brothers James and Henry. George Austen apparently gave his daughters unfettered access to his large and varied library, was tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing. According to Park Honan, a biographer of Austen, life in the Austen home was lived in "an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere" where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.
[28]
After returning from school in 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment".
[
Private theatricals were also a part of Austen's education. From when she was seven until she was thirteen, the family and close friends staged a series of plays, including
Richard Sheridan
's
The Rivals
(1775) and
David Garrick's
Bon Ton
. While the details are unknown, Austen would certainly have joined in these activities, as a spectator at first and as a participant when she was older.
[30]
Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests one way in which Austen's comedic and satirical gifts were cultivated.
In 1788,
her portrait
may have been commissioned by her great uncle, Francis Austen.
Juvenilia
Perhaps as early as 1787, Austen began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her family's amusement.
[32]
Austen later compiled "fair copies" of 29 of these early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the
Juvenilia
, containing pieces originally written between 1787 and 1793.
[33]
There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as the period 1809–1811, and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814.
[34]
Among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled
Love and Freindship
[
sic
], in which she mocked popular
novels of sensibility
,
[35]
and
The History of England
, a manuscript of 34 pages accompanied by 13 watercolour miniatures by her sister Cassandra.
Austen's
History
parodied
popular historical writing, particularly
Oliver Goldsmith
's
History of England
(1764).
[36]
Austen wrote, for example: "Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin & predecessor Richard the 2nd, to resign it to him, & to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered."
[37]
Austen's
Juvenilia
are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist
Laurence Sterne
and the 20th century comedy group
Monty Python
.
[38]
Adulthood
As Austen grew into adulthood, she continued to live at her parents' home, carrying out those activities normal for women of her age and social standing: she practised the
fortepiano
, assisted her sister and mother with supervising servants, and attended female relatives during childbirth and older relatives on their deathbeds.
[39]
She sent short pieces of writing to her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine and Jane Anna Elizabeth.
[40]
Austen was particularly proud of her accomplishments as a seamstress.
[41]
She also attended church regularly, socialized frequently with friends and neighbours,
[42]
and read novels — often of her own composition — aloud with her family in the evenings. Socializing with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the
assembly rooms
in the town hall.
[43]
Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".
[44]
In 1793, Austen began and then abandoned a short play, later entitled
Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts
, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgments of Austen's favourite contemporary novel,
The History of Sir Charles Grandison
(1753), by
Samuel Richardson
.
[45]
Honan speculates that at some point not long after writing
Love and Freindship
[
sic
] in 1789, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort", that is, to become a professional writer.
[46]
Beginning in about 1793, she began to write longer, more sophisticated works.
[46]
Between 1793 and 1795, Austen wrote
Lady Susan
, a short
epistolary novel
, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work.
[47]
It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer
Claire Tomalin
describes the heroine of the novella as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray, and abuse her victims, whether lovers, friends or family. Tomalin writes: "Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the
Restoration dramatists
who may have provided some of her inspiration ... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters."
Illness and death
Early in 1816, Jane Austen began to feel unwell. She ignored her illness at first and continued to work and to participate in the usual round of family activities. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable to Austen and to her family, and Austen's physical condition began a long, slow, and irregular deterioration culminating in her death the following year.
[83]
The majority of Austen biographers rely on Dr. Vincent Cope's tentative 1964
retrospective diagnosis
and list her cause of death as
Addison's disease
. However, her final illness has also been described as
Hodgkin's lymphoma
.
[H]
Recent work by Katherine White of Britain's Addison’s Disease Self Help Group suggests that Austen probably died of
bovine tuberculosis
,
[84]
a disease (now) commonly associated with drinking
unpasteurized
milk. One contributing factor or cause of her death, discovered by Linda Robinson Walker and described in the Winter 2010 issue of Persuasions on-line, might be
Brill–Zinsser disease
, a recurrent form of
typhus
, which she had as a child. Brill–Zinsser disease is to typhus as
shingles
is to
chicken pox
; when a victim of typhus endures stress, malnutrition or another infection, typhus can recur as Brill–Zinsser disease.
[85]
Austen continued to work in spite of her illness. She became dissatisfied with the ending of
The Elliots
and rewrote the final two chapters, finishing them on 6 August 1816. In January 1817, Austen began work on a new novel she called
The Brothers
, later titled
Sanditon
upon its first publication in 1925, and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably because her illness prevented her from continuing. Austen made light of her condition to others, describing it as "Bile" and
rheumatism
, but as her disease progressed she experienced increasing difficulty walking or finding the energy for other activities. By mid-April, Austen was confined to her bed. In May, Cassandra and Henry escorted Jane to
Winchester
for medical treatment. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of
Winchester Cathedral
. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation, mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.
رد مع الإقتباس