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THE CLASSICS
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JANE AUSTEN.
(1775-1817)
NOVELS: Northanger Abbey (1797)
Sense and Sensebility (1797)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park. (1814)
Emma (1815)
Persuasion (1815)
One of the greatest of English novelists and one of the most popular translated into films and television ‘Pride and Prejudice’ being possibly the outstanding favourite of them all.
Born in Hampshire, one of seven children, entertainment was limited in the rural peace of her youth.
Putting on small plays in a barn, visiting and reading were the main pastimes – the barn probably saw her first attempts at writing these plays.
But it was her experiences among ordinary everyday people and happenings instead of the extraordinary and luridly dramatic, which makes her quiet, steadfast observations such memorably abiding novels.
Of six novels, four were published without her name being mentioned. The other two were published posthumously.
Happy marriages, unlike her heroines’ fate in many cases, was not to be for Jane Austen. Her fathers’ death in 1805, allied her with her sister, Cassandra, in Southampton, and then at Chawton Cottage in Alton, Hampshire.
A Jane Austen museum has recently opened in Queens Square, Bath. This is a must for all Austen fans. It doesn’t exactly have Mr D’Arcy opening the beautiful little from door, but it lives and breathes the atmosphere engenderer in Jane Austen’s’ finest work. There is an introductory lecture and thereafter a visitor’s delightful meander around the evocative town house. This contains costumes, film and television photographs from recent dramatisations of the works, and recreations of the period rooms in beautiful detail.
Well worth a visit.
By Dot.
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