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For Jane Austen, the best education a father can give to his child is to befriend her.
Sir Thomas Bertram has lost both his daughters to unhappy marriages, and now has the unwelcome leisure to reflect on where he went wrong. He gave them a progressive education, he laid down the law; but what he should have done was to get to know them, and to win their trust.
Elizabeth Bennet stonewalls her way through a disagreeable encounter with Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
In Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh has heard that her wealthy nephew, Fitzwilliam Darcy, is planning to propose to Elizabeth Bennet, instead of her own daughter. She has raced to Longbourn, Elizabeth’s home, to demand an explanation of the ‘impossible’, but Lizzy sees no reason to be defensive.
Anne Thackeray saw something satisfying in the self-control of Anne Elliot.
Anne Thackeray wondered if the novelists of her own generation (she singled out George Eliot) were bathing the reader in a little too much emotion. Austen’s heroines did not share so intimately, or express so freely, but she had studied their characters more closely. Such a one was Anne Elliot, of Persuasion.
When she was ten, Catherine Morland showed none of the qualities needed to impress the ladies who read romantic fiction.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published after her death in 1817, is a playful swipe at contemporary women’s fiction. She begins by warning us that Catherine Morland had not experienced the kind of childhood — marked by fragile beauty, precocious accomplishments, and sentimental attachments — that fans of romantic fiction expected in their heroines. She was, in fact, perfectly normal.
Now that Mr Willoughby has been found, and found to be married, Elinor Dashwood has the disagreeable task of making sure that her sister feels it is all for the best.
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility turns on the baffling behaviour of Mr Willoughby, who assiduously courts Marianne Dashwood only to vanish from the neighbourhood. When he is finally tracked down in London, he has married a woman of fashion and wealth, and Marianne’s sister Elinor — with every right to a resounding ‘I told you so’ — has to make sure that Marianne and their mother have both accepted the realities.
James Edward Austen-Leigh tells us what it was that made his aunt, the celebrated novelist Jane Austen, so remarkable.
James Austen-Leigh has been describing the accomplishments of his aunt, the novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817). She was fluent in French, he tells us, and a decent pianist with a pleasant singing voice; she was much addicted to the novels of Samuel Richardson and the poetry of George Crabbe, and well-read in English history too.
From the very first lines, Jane Austen’s classic novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pokes affectionate fun at Georgian England.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813) are arguably the best-loved in all English fiction. In the drawing-room of Longbourn, a gentleman’s residence near the Hertfordshire village of Meryton, pretty but empty-headed Mrs Bennet is all of a flutter because there is a new neighbour in Netherfield Park.