Jane Austen, Who is Jane Austen, Literature, Podcast

Episode 1 - Jane Austen | Why are They so Important?

Hello everyone. This is the very first podcast episode of our Why are they Important? series. In this series, we will be talking about important people who lived in the world. This episode is made by Karabük Modern Languages Club. Please enjoy.

In this episode, we will be talking about Jane Austen who is an influential novel writer.

Jane Austen is one of the most famous writers in English literature. Her books are read by people all over the world and have been made into countless TV, film, theatre, and radio adaptations.

This is all the more impressive because she only wrote six full-length novels. These were: Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.

But Jane Austen was writing 200 years ago. Why are her books still relevant, and why do people still read her today? 

First, let's talk about Jane Austen’s life and know her.

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Hampshire, the seventh child of a priest.

She was given her first education by her father and she was very lucky than the women of that period. His father, a priest, turned the barn of their house into a small theater.

Jane Austen was writing her own stories at the age of 12. Although,  Her first novel was only published 25 years later.

After her father's death, she moved to Chawton with her brother in 1809. This house has now been turned into a museum today.

Novels by Jane Austen are among the popular classics today. In her books, she has handled people's weaknesses with elegant humor.

Although all of the protagonists in her novels are women, their novels end with a happy marriage.

All of the author's novels have been adapted for film or television. The writer, who never married during her life, died on 8 June 1817 due to breast cancer.

This was a short summary of Jane Austen. After we have learned about Jane Austen. Let’s dig out what makes her so important even today.

SHE’S VERY FUNNY

Jane Austen is a great comic writer. The formal language of 200 years ago might make you think her novels are quite serious – but this isn’t the case! Jane Austen had a dry, wicked sense of humor and her novels are full of satire, comedy, and wit.

Her characters supply the comedy. They are silly, self-satisfied, vain, proud and affected. Such people cannot escape being laughed at. As Mr Bennet declares in Pride & Prejudice:

‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’

Here, we can see that jane austen is supplying the comedy by her characters and making them silly.

SHE CREATED GREAT CHARACTERS

The second thing what makes Jane Austin is so important that she created great characters

Jane Austen was one of the first writers to create realistic, complex characters in her novels. Before her, most novels featured characters that were two dimensional – they were either wholly good or very wicked. In her novels Jane Austen mixes things up, creating characters who are true to life, with good and bad points, who mean well but get things wrong, or who behave badly but we can’t help liking them anyway.

We get to know these characters through their speech. Jane Austen’s novels make use of more dialogue and less description than other novels of the time. Through this technique, we meet the characters directly – we hear them speak, as in a play or film.

It’s true that Jane Austen’s characters look and sound rather different from the people we know today. They are disguised by the formal language and social etiquette of 200 years ago, but if we look past this we can see that her novels are full of people we can recognise from our everyday lives. 

SHE WAS AN IMPORTANT SOCIAL COMMENTATOR…

Jane Austen has been hailed as an acute social commentator – meaning that her novels look closely at the ways in which society worked and draw attention to its flaws. She does not openly condemn them, as other more radical writers of the time did; but if you read closely you can see that she is critical of the laws and conventions of the world she was living in: a world that denied to women many of the opportunities and freedoms we now take for granted.

Today, readers can miss this subtext and pigeon-hole her as a romance novelist.  While it is true that her six novels turn on marriages and feature flirting, affairs, and illicit elopements, they are far more than this. Her stories  actively explore gender relations, power, money, education, parental responsibilities and marriage through a female lens.

…AND AN EARLY FEMINIST

Her novels are not feminist in the way we mean it today. But they do hint at the need for equality between the sexes. Her heroines defy gender norms, and push for more agency in their own lives.

The overarching theme that runs throughout all her novels is the inequality faced by women in Regency society. At the time when she was writing, women had very few legal, social or economic rights. Very few upper- and middle-class women could own their own property. Women had little formal education, could not enter university or the professions. Legally, an unmarried woman was the responsibility of her father, but once married she was completely under her husband’s control, as were her children and any property. Yet for most women marriage was the only option for respectable survival.

So while Jane Austen’s novels do revolve around marriage, we must remember how immensely important the question of marriage was to most women. At one end of the scale, it was a question of wealth and status; but at the other it was simply about securing a home, securing oneself from poverty, and avoiding the destitution of an ‘old maid’.

But while Jane Austen makes clear the hard economic facts of marriage, she also offers another possibility: marriage for mutual love and esteem. If a husband effectively ‘owns’ his wife, then marriage to a man who does not care about you is not a safe or secure place to be. The hope was that you might marry a man who loved and respected you, and would treat you as an equal even if the law did not demand it.  While her novels show unhappy marriages and marriages of economic necessity , she is optimistic  enough to suggest that it may be possible to find equality inside marriage.
 

SHE WAS A LITERARY GENIUS, AND PIONEERED NEW WRITING TECHNIQUES

Jane Austen’s novels are told in the third person by an omniscient narrator who has access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters. She makes use of minimal description, but instead focuses on the speech and action of her characters – if you open one of her novels at random and look at the page, you’ll see how much dialogue there is. Much of her work looks like a play script, which makes it ideal to read aloud.

Jane Austen also made extensive use of a style known as “free indirect discourse” or “free indirect style” – a literary technique in which the narrator’s voice appears to take on properties of the character’s voice to the extent that as a reader you are not quite sure who owns the words or thoughts 

Jane Austen didn’t invent this writing style; however, she was one of the first writers to use it consistently throughout her work. Today, she is regarded as one of the pioneers of the style, anticipating writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who extended the use of this style of writing in novels of the early twentieth century.
 

SHE WAS AMBITIOUS, DETERMINED AND INSPIRATIONAL

AMBITIOUS

We don’t know enough about Jane Austen’s life to be able to paint a clear picture of what she was like as a person. But we do know that she was a determined and ambitious writer. She always wrote under difficult circumstances, in small households with little personal space, alongside her social and household duties, and in a society which did not think that a woman writing to make money was quite respectable.

DETERMINED

Her earliest attempts at publication were rejected, but she kept on writing. It was not until 1811 that her first novel was published. By then, she had written at least three full length novels. those early years of writing without public recognition must have been frustrating. Nevertheless, she was persistent, refusing to give up.
 

INSPIRATIONAL

Finally, in early 1817, when she was gravely ill, she started writing a new novel, which she left unfinished (today it is known as Sanditon). Even in the face of illness, she kept writing for as long as she could.

HER WORKS HAVE STOOD THE TEST OF TIME

Jane Austen’s six novels are more famous and widely read today than ever. In her own lifetime she enjoyed some success, but did not earn much from her book sales, and since she was published anonymously, she enjoyed none of the celebrity we might associate with fame.  In the course of the nineteenth century, her reputation grew, and by 1900 her novels enjoyed much of the phenomenal success we now associate with her name.

Today, her works are read and loved all over the world. They have been translated into almost every known language, adapted for film, theatre, TV and radios.

This was about why Jane Austen is well known today and why she is so important.

I hope that you had fun. I will look forward to see you in the next coming episodes. Have a great day.

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