Context for coursework

Jane Austen

Background:

• Austen was born in Hampshire, but she moved around quite a lot
• She has also lived in Steventon, Bath, Southampton and Chawton
• She was never married and had no direct relationships with any famous men or women from her time
• Jane and Cassandra (her sister) had a very close bond
• They were taken out of school due to fever and then received education from their brothers
• In the background, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution was ongoing

From Austen by Christopher Gillie (Pearson 1985)

Critics of Austen:

• "The more accurately the critic can reconstruct Jane Austen's world, the more clearly he is likely to see the macrocosmic significance of the tiny events..."
• "...placing Jane Austen in relation to contemporary thinking about the role and capabilities of women."
• "Jane Austen is totally committed to her society and its values."
• "Affirmation of her society may be the main thrust of Jane Austen's fiction."
• Auerbach argues: "Jane Austen's novels work around tension between the security of a restricted world and its unrelenting imprisonment."

     Nina Auerbach

• "She becomes a plotter of modes of confinement for elastic imagination like those of Catherine Morland..."
• "Many readers have been troubled by the shadowed epithalamia in Jane Austen's novels."
• "Northanger Abbey, 'Henry and Charlotte were married, the bells rang and everybody smiled'... weddings seem to transmit signals beneath their comic reassurances."
• "Jane Austen's novels seem superficially removed from this endless series of dark passageways."
• "Romantic double prison, while General Tilney shifts imperceptibly between ordinary father and monster until the two come to resemble each other."

From Jane Austen, in a social context, edited by David Monaghan (Macmillan Press LTD. 1981)

John Keats

Critics:

• "Certain of Keats's poems, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', 'St. Agnes'... have been the initiating and moving first experiences of the poetic and literary life of so many."
• "I want to consider Keats's writings as comments on his life."
• "Keats, who was in a formal sense the least well educated of the great Romantic poets"

From Introduction to Keats by William Walsh (Methuen & Co. 1981)