Lecture 2

1. Rela ng Background (Poli cal and Social) to the Pride and Prejudice: Our purpose is
to explore the link between imagina ve representa on and intellectual-theore cal
analysis. Jane Austen lived through the Georgian era, while most of our background
readings in the syllabi are Victorian. The background prose readings relate to both
the Austen and Bronte text, but in slightly di erent ways. It is important to rst
understand the poli cal and social context and then locate the author and the novel
within it.

2. Timeline- Austen was born just before the American Declara on of Independence,
Warren Has ngs was the Governor-General in India that me and the Austens were
related to him distantly. Austen was one of two sisters, 5 brothers; wealthy rela ons,
no inheritance. Ini ally wrote her novel without revealing her name – Novel by a
Lady; Why? Money earned from wri ng was a source of income but not as much as
other male authors or even Fanny Burney another woman novelist; (Primary material
to look at: Jane Austen’s le ers to her sister Cassandra; her nephew’s memoir on
her); she called the novel ‘my own darling child’ – both Sense and Sensibility and
Pride and Prejudice are about sisters...she was also very close to her sister Cassandra

3. 1789: French Revolu on. Important authors wri ng at that me: William Blake,
Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecra (Roman cism); Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and
the signi cance of French ideas in England. 1807-Aboli on of slave trade in Bri sh
Empire (slave trade was a major source of income for Victorian traders); 1811 Jane
Austen published Sense and Sensibility, 1813; birth of Dickens and Pride and
Prejudice published along with Byron’s Childe Harold. Austen has already published
Mans eld Park, Emma. 1818- Austen dies and her brother publishes Northanger
Abbey and Persuasion posthumously and Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights) is born.
1820: Death of George III and accession of George IV.

4. NO HINT OF THESE IN AUSTEN’S NOVELS? – Does she have a narrow view of society?
Is she aware of these changes? Why doesn’t she engage with them in her c on?

Readings: Tony Tanner, ‘Introduc on’, Jane Austen (Harvard University Press, 1986);
Worldview edn of P & P.

5. Rela ng the text to the History of the Novel as a Literary Genre. Genre: A French term
for a kind, a literary type or class. The major Classical genres were: epic, tragedy, lyric,
comedy and sa re, to which would now be added novel and short story.(p.342)

Novel: Derived from the Italian novella, ‘tale, piece of news’, and now applied to a variety of
wri ngs whose only common a ribute is that they are extended pieces of prose c on. The
length of novels varies greatly – debate about it- dis nc on between a long short story or a
short novel or novella are blurred. In contemporary prac ce, usually a novel will be between
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 60-70,000 words and say, 200,000. From roughly the 16th to 18th c its meaning tended to
derive from the Italian novella and the Spanish novella (the French term nouvelle is closely
related) and the term o en used in the plural sense referred to short stories or tales of the
kind one nds in Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1349-51), Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1613).
Nowadays we would classify all the above as short stories. Broadly speaking, the term
denoted a prose narra ve about characters and their ac ons in everyday life and usually in
the present, with the emphasis on things being ‘new’ or a ‘novelty’. It was used in
contradis nc on to ‘romance’. In the 19th c, the concept of the ‘novel’ was enlarged. ... we
have epistolary novel, the sen mental novel, the novel of sensa on, the condi on of
England novel, the campus novel, the Gothic novel and the historical novel, the picaresque
novel, the detec ve novel, the thriller, etc. Around the 18th c the range and variety of the
novel is immense, but the form was s ll in its early stages. In the early years of the 19th c,
two gures dominate English c on: Sir Walter Sco and Jane Austen. He established the
historical novel; Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817), Ivanhoe (1819) etc; Middle years of the
19th c- Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope.

See: J A Cuddon, The Penguin Dic onary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (1998) p.
560-600

Ian Wa , The Rise of the Novel

Janet Todd

Gary Kelly
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