Essay on Jane Austen Novels: Success After Death

Throughout history, relationships between people have been questioned based off what people have heard or seen. Jane Austen writes the love story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, that have conflicts when it comes to their relationships caused by miscommunication. In Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen reveals the danger of making judgements on insufficient information through relationships between the characters. Miscommunication creates confusion and a mix of emotions from the characters.

Jane Austen's 1811 novel "Sense and Sensibility" puts across an account involving two English sisters who come across a series of hardships in their endeavor to find their personal identities in a relatively hostile environment. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are forced to leave their home, the estate at Norland Park, consequent to their father's death. The two experience economic problems and come to see the world with different eyes as they move in a small house and as they interact with people who are primarily motivated by finances. Even though the two sisters have diverging personalities, they go through similar experiences and they come to have similar perceptions of society.

The author Inger Sigrun Brodey, a reputable JASNA’s North American Scholar who is a frequent speaker at Jane Austen Society meetings, writes in the article "Making sense of sensibility." from Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal that Marianne Dashwood symbolizes sensibility and her sister Elinor represents common sense. Marianne shares many similarities with Lydia Bennet, the youngest daughter in Pride and Prejudice. Both believe their world is naturally good without corruption such as greed and lust to mar it. Both have foibles that strangers generally are naturally good. However, in actuality there are very good actors that manipulate the vulnerable. Humans have a way of being imminently selfish and Austen is depicting it with the characters such as the dastardly Mr. Wickham of Pride and Prejudice and thoughtless Mr. Willoughby of Sense and Sensibility. Both men affect their counterparts in a negative way and take advantage of the situation. This creates a bias of distrustful feelings, that sympathy may be able to heal, but society might think is self-absorption. Nonetheless, pity is created for the poor creatures. In fact, it is sensibility or empathy that is necessary to have a deeper connection like love or hate, and it is fear of rejection that may be the culprit of a hesitancy to love. This relates to the larger picture of the transition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, sense contrasts sensibility because sense has logic and sensibility is fueled by emotional reactions

The life of Jane Austen is a very interesting story and many would say that Jane Austen wasn’t like the rest. She was an English novelist who was not only successful but also very quiet about her writings and publishments; most of her novels were not open to the public during her lifetime. She was born on December 16th of the year 1775, and she was the seventh child to a well known clergyman and wife. Jane was not educated like most would be; she was homeschooled by her father. Her father had huge libraries in their home and this is what created the school-like feeling of the Austen estate. Jane was a normal, and a quiet young lady but also had the opportunities to live life in the greater world, by the access

    "Like all true literary classics, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is still capable of engaging us, both emotionally and intellectually" (Twayne back flap) through its characters and themes. This essay illustrates how Jane Austen uses the characterization of the major characters and irony to portray the theme of societal frailties and vices because of a flawed humanity. Austen writes about the appearance vs. the reality of the characters, the disinclination to believe other characters, the desire to judge others, and the tendency to take people on first impressions.

The novel, sense and sensibility, written by Jane Austen was a social critic and a feminist. Austen would defy the social laws or that standard woman. Challenging the standards on which was set for women and would disintegrate the laws of society. Throughout the novel Austen demonstrates the power of self worth in the development of the characters and how the women enhance their characteristics and exhibit their femininity to lead to the ultimate desire;

The romantic era in literature was characterized by many different authors, male and female. Jane Austen was only one of many authors in that era, and one of the longest lasting; through her many novels, she shows various views on love and marriage. In Jane Austen’s critically acclaimed novel, Pride and Prejudice, Austen spares no character, male or female, in her criticism of the understood custom that the only route to happiness was marriage.

Sense and Sensibility was first published in 1811, by Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility represents the neoclassical, dualistic moral world where values and exclusion values will ultimately be successful in a painful, romantic feeling. Not only that, he was making serious cynicisms of society's eighteenth centuries in which the aristocrats were praised and indirectly influencing young people's minds, not the love of love but to betray it just for Wealth. In the novel, Lucy and Willoughby symbolize this kind of people of society

Jane Austen's intelligence and sophisticated diction made her a revolutionary author, and her mastery surpasses most modern authors. By challenging conventional stereotypes in her novels, she gives the open-minded reader a new perspective through the message she conveys. Her first novel, Northanger Abbey, focuses on reading. However, she parallels typical novel reading with the reading of people. Catherine Morland's coming of age hinges on her ability to become a better reader of both novels and people.

Sense and Sensibility written by Jane Austen is a novel that does not only deal with two sister’s love matters, but how two dissimilar personalities respond to society and love. The theme of “society vs. sense” is existed throughout the novel because it is concerned with the ruling of one’s feelings, or the incapability to do so. Declaring love for someone, nurturing one’s self and not caring what people think is important in expressing this kind of “social duty.”(Pam Morris, 43) This kind of theme is always present, with some dramatization, within Emma Thompson’s 1995 film adaption. Literary critic Deborah Kaplan argues that Thompson’s film adaption demonstrates “harlequinization”, where the narrative structure of the “mass-market structure”, where a lot of people really like them, it focuses on a hero and a heroin’s courtship at the expense of the other characters and experiences. Kaplan is stating that the film is negative because some characters are underrepresented. She’s right, but at the same time it is to be expected because it is a film adaption. I argue that Kaplan is right, the film adaption does demonstrate this “harlequinization” to the point where it ignores all the important scenes within the novel such as how the Dashwood sisters are represented, Marianne’s rescuers Willoughby and Colonel Brandon in contrast to the novel.

In Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility, the themes sense, and sensibility critically capture women in the 18th century. In the novel we can see two main characters portray themselves on opposite ends of the spectrum. To understand the ideologies, present in the woman sex one can use Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Existential Paralysis of Women” that outline how women are controlled in society. In “Sense & Sensibility” we can see how gender is shaped by social constructs and how it determines one’s disposition like mentioned by Simone de Beauvoir.

Austen also wrote novels that showed that women can and should use their minds particularly Elizabeth Bennet. Sense and Sensibility also is a romantic novel that keeps to the same theme of women using their minds. It is about three sisters and their mother. The main two characters however are Marianne and Elinor Dashwood. Like Austen, they struggled with money and were forced to move after their father’s untimely death. After they move they both meet men that they think they love and both get hurt because of this love. Also like Austen, Marianne meets a man named Willoughy. They fall in love and he ends up leaving her because of her financial situation. Elinor has almost the same situation although it is very different in the end. After the Dashwood sisters meet the Steele sisters, Elinor decides that they do not use their minds like they could. Elinor’s different situation is with a man named Ferrar. He almost has to marry Lucy Steele over Elinor because of her financial situation but she ends up being able to marry for love and Lucy married Ferrar’s brother. Marianne ends up also getting married but not to Willoughby and not completely for love. This book was a great example of how Austen showed how uses day to day activities to show the woman’s

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austin was a moralistic novel depicting the two main forms of attitudes at that time; the neo -classics and the romantics. The period in which it was written, nineteenth century England, was laden with social etiquette and customs imposed on people of that time; and thus the characters of Jane Austin's novels. The novels' two main protagonists; Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, exemplify the Neo classical era and the romantic era, respectfully. Jane Austin instils Neo-classic and romantic ideals in Elinor and Marianne as to present a view of each attitude and to further enhance the discrepancies of social nineteenths century England.

This shows how influential her writing has become throughout the years. Austen’s writing opened the door for other writers to explore romantic literature. “J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, grew up reading Austen, who she described as ‘the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire’” (Redman). She inspires others, not only to write romance, but science fiction like Rowling has done. Her influence on the literature work is is astonishing considering she lived in the 1700’s. Many writers of that time are forgotten by most, but she has lived on way past her death. Austen is taught in high school and college English classes. She has been a huge inspiration for female writers as well. “Jane Austen is now thought of as one of the greatest English authors and considered by many as the first great woman novelist” (Jane Austen [b.1775-d. 1817]). Being considered as one of the first female novelist is a great accomplishment and a huge honor, it is a great shame the “creator” of romance did not get the recognition until after her death. She could have helped develop most extraordinary writers in her

Jane Austen lived from 1775 until 1817, a span of four decades that saw significant changes in English social, political, and economic life. At the time her birth, England was embroiled in a bitter struggle with its American colonies, the loss of which, several years later, proved to be a tremendous blow to English political and military prestige. Under the rule of George III, England's political climate became increasingly unstable with constant struggles between the King and Whig politicians. Ireland received its independence in 1782, although the violence that had long plagued the country continued to rage. Across the Channel, the French Revolution had begun and the English aristocracy watched in horror as royal heads began to roll.