“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
So says Henry Tilney, the charming young clergyman in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, defending a genre that was taken about as seriously in Austen’s time as drugstore romances and “beach reads” are today. Novels, to high-minded nineteenth-century readers, were trashy and sentimental, and only filled women’s heads with nonsense. Born on Deceember 16, 1775, Austen (d.1817) herself came from a family of voracious readers; she said they were “not ashamed” to read novels. Austen’s works, including favorites like Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, are marked by a focus on young women in situations similar to her own: educated and imaginative daughters of the middling-rich. Unlike her heroines, who depended on marriage to secure their social standing, Austen (as well as her only sister, Cassandra) never married.
Test your Austen “Sense & Sensibility” with this quick quiz (Answers below and pretty easy at that!):
1. Under what name were Austen’s novels published during her lifetime?
2. What is the name of Austen’s last, never-completed novel?
3. What was the profession of George Austen, Jane’s father.
4. Which of Austen’s novels became a movie starring Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, and Hugh Grant?
5. What film transformed Pride and Prejudice into a Bollywood-style musical?
6. Who called Austen “the most perfect artist among women”?
The largest website devoted to all things Austen is “The Republic of Pemberley:
http://www.pemberley.com/
Answers
1. None—they were published anonymously, “By a Lady.”
2. Sanditon. Several contemporary writers have “completed” the novel and there are versions of these “finished” books.
3. Rector. The Rectory at Seventon, Hampshire, where Jane Austen wrote three of her novels, was destroyed by fire in 1823.
4. Sense and Sensibility.
5. Bride and Prejudice.
6. Virginia Woolf.
