Name: Dhruvi Chavda
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Assignment:Jane Austen’s style of writing           

            Jane Austen’s style of writing

 About Jane Austen:

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 – left his body on 18 July 1817. She was an English novelist. Her realism, biting irony and social commentary as well as her acclaimed plots have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. The landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. 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.  From 1811 until 1816, with the release of “Sense and Sensibility (1811)”,” Pride and Prejudice (1813)”, “Mansfield Park (1814)” and “Emma (1815)”, 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.  Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her works, though usually popular, were first published anonymously and 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.

Jane Austen’s style of writing:

Jane Austen’s discrete literary style relies on a combination of irony, parody, burlesque, free indirect speech, and a degree of realism. She uses parody and burlesque for effect of comedy and to critique the portrayal of women in 18th-century sentimental and gothic novels. Austen extends her critique by highlighting social hypocrisy through irony. She often creates an ironic tone through free indirect speech in which the thoughts, ideas and words of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator.

 The degree to which critics believe Austen's characters have psychological depth informs their views regarding her realism. While some scholars argue that Jane Austen falls into a tradition of realism because of her finely executed portrayal of individual characters and her emphasis on "the everyday", others contend that her characters lack a depth of feeling compared with earlier works, and that this, combined with Austen's polemical tone, places her outside the realist tradition.

Austen's most of the novels have often been characterized as "comedies of manners" or as "country house novels".  They also include fairy tale elements.  Austen's have little narrative or scenic description—they contain much more dialogue. Austen shapes a discrete and subtly-constructed voice for each character.

 Austen's plots are fundamentally about education; her female characters come to see themselves and their conduct more clearly, and become better, more moral people. Throughout her novels, serious reading is associated with intellectual and moral development. The extent to which Austen's novels reflect feminist themes has been extensively debated by scholars; however, most critics agree that her novels highlight how some female characters take charge of their own worlds while others are confined, physically and spiritually. Almost all of her works explore the precarious economic situation in which women of the late 18th and early 19th centuries found them. Jane Austen's novels have variously been described as politically conservative and progressive.

Jane Austen’s writing of juvenile is parodies and burlesques of popular 18th-century genres, such as the sentimental novel. She humorously demonstrates that the reversals of social convention common in sentimental novels, such as contempt for parental guidance, are ridiculously impractical; her characters "are dead to all common sense". Her interest in these comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of novelist Frances Burney and playwrights Richard Sheridan and David Garrick, continued less overtly throughout her professional career. Jane Austen's burlesque is characterized by its mocking imitation and its exaggerated, displaced emphasis.

She ridicules the plot improbabilities and rigid conventions of the Gothic novel. However, Austen does not categorically reject the Gothic. As Austen scholar Claudia Johnson argues, Austen pokes fun at the "stock gothic machinery—storms, cabinets, curtains, manuscripts—with blithe amusement", but she takes the threat of the tyrannical father seriously. Austen uses parody and burlesque not only for comedic effect, but also, according to feminist critics, to reveal how both sentimental and Gothic novels warped the lives of women who attempted to live out the roles depicted in them.

Irony is also one of Austen's most characteristic and most discussed literary techniques.  She contrasts the plain meaning of a statement with the comic, undermining the meaning of the original to create ironic disjunctions. In her juvenile works, she relies upon satire, parody, and irony based on incongruity. Her mature novels employ irony to foreground social hypocrisy. In particular, Austen uses irony to critique the marriage market.  Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice Austen's irony illuminates the foibles of individual characters and her society. In her later novels, in particular, she turns her irony "against the errors of law, manners and customs, in failing to recognize women as the accountable beings they are, or ought to be".

Austen is most renowned for her development of free indirect speech, a technique pioneered by 18th-century novelists Henry Fielding and Frances Burney. Austen uses it to provide summaries of conversations or to compress, dramatically or ironically, a character's speech and thoughts.  In Sense and Sensibility, Austen experiments extensively for the first time with this technique.

“Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?”

Jane Austen represents the inner thoughts of the character and creates the illusion that the reader is entering the character's mind.  She often uses indirect speech for background characters. However, Page writes that "for Jane Austen...the supreme virtue of free indirect speech… that it offers the possibility of achieving something of the vividness of speech without the appearance for a moment of a total silencing of the authorial voice.

The extent to which Austen's novels are realistic is vigorously debated by scholars. The lack of physical description in her novels lends them an air of unreality. In Austen novels, as Page notes, there is a "conspicuous absence of words referring to physical perception, the world of shape and color and sensuous response".  Yet, Austen carefully researched the background of her novels, using almanacs and read books to accurately describe the chronology and geography of her fictional worlds.  Many scholars view this connection between the reader and character as a mark of realism.   At the time Austen was writing, the historical novels of Walter Scott and early realist novels of Maria Edgeworth had already initiated the realist tradition. Jane Austen's novels are sometimes seen as an outgrowth of these new genres.  William Galperin has argued, Austen could not have participated in nineteenth-century realism—the realism with which she later became associated—because it had not yet been fully defined. He argues Austen's novels were part of the beginning phases of realism.  Therefore instead of seeing Austen as a realist writer, he sees her as a picturesque writer on the cusp of realism. Her attention to detail, probability, and compositionality, lead him to call her the "historian of the everyday”.

 John Wiltshire argues that Austen's works may also be distinguished from the realist tradition in their treatment of illness and health. In the realist tradition, good health is taken for granted, as part of the invisible background, and characters that are ill, or injured, or deformed, become prominently visible for that reason. In Austen's works, the issue of health is in the foreground—Emma's good health, Mr. Woodhouse's hypochondria, Fanny Price's "physical insecurity."  Austen's works may also be distinguished from the realist tradition in their treatment of illness and health.

Genre is another style used by the Jane Au sten. Austen novels have often been characterized as "country house novels" or as "comedies of manners". Austen's novels can easily be situated within the 18th-century novel tradition. Austen, like the rest of her family, was a great novel reader.   She read widely within the genre, including many works considered mediocre both then and now, but tended to emphasize domestic fiction by women writers and her own novels contain many references to these works. Austen's early works are often structured around a pair of characters.  For example, Sense and Sensibility is a didactic novel based on the contrast between the beliefs and conduct of two heroines, a novel format that was particularly fashionable in the 1790s and exemplified by Edgeworth's Letters of Julia and Caroline and Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art.   Because circulating libraries often used catalogues that only listed a novel's name, Austen chose titles that would have resonance for her readers; abstract comparisons like "sense and sensibility" were part of a moralistic tradition and eponymous heroine names were part of a new romantic novel tradition.  Conduct books integrated the styles and rhetoric of earlier genres, such as devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and works on household economy.

They offered their readers a description of (most often) the ideal woman while at the same time handing out practical advice. Austen's fiction built on and questioned the assumptions of this tradition, reacting against conduct book writers.  Beginning with the juvenilia, as early as Catherine or the Bower, Austen viewed this genre as thoroughly mindless and irrelevant to social realities.

Austen's conversations contain many short sentences, question and answer pairs, and rapid exchanges between characters, most memorable perhaps in the witty repartee between Elizabeth and Darcy. Austen grants each of her characters a distinctive and subtlety-constructed voice: they are carefully distinguished by their speech.  She is unable to express real feeling, since all of her emotions are mediated through empty hyperbole.  Austen uses conversations about literature in particular to establish an implicit moral frame of reference.