1801 Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, retires, and with the Napoleonic Wars looming in the background of British conciousness, he and his wife and two daughters leave the quiet country life of Steventon for the bustling fashionable town Bath. Many of the characters and depictions of society in JAne Austen subsequent novels are shaped by her experiences in Bath.
1803 Austen receives her first publication offer for her novel "Susan," but the manuscript is subsequently returned ny the publisher; it will later be revised and released as Northanger Abbey. The United States buys Louisana from France. Ralph Waldo Emmerson is born.
1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor of France. Spain declares war on britain.
1805 Jane’s father dies. Jane and her mother and sister subsequently move to southampton. Sir Walter Scott publishes his Lay of the Last Minstrel.
1809 After Several years of travelling and short-term stays in various towns, the Austen women settle in Chawton Cottage in Hampshire; in the parlor of this house Austen quietly composes her most famous works. Chales Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are born.
1811 Austen begins Mansfield Park in February. In November Sense and Sensibility, the romantic misadventures of two sisters, is published with the notation "By a Lady"; all of Austen’s subsquent novels are also brought out anonymously. George III is declared insane, and the morally
corrupt Prince Wales (the future King George IV) becomes regent.
1812 Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and the first parts of Lord Byron’s Child Harold are published. The United States declared war on Great Britain.
1813 Pride and Prejudice is published; it describes the conflict between the high-spirited daughter of a country gentleman and a wealthy landowner. Napoleon is exiled to Elba, and the Bourbons restored are restored to power.
1814 Mansfield Park is published; it is the story of the difficult though ultimately rewarded life of a poor relation who lives in the house of her wealthy uncle.
1815 Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.
1816 Austen’s comic novel Emma is published; it centers on the heroine’s misguided attempts at matchmaking. Charlotte Brontë is born.
1817 Austen begins the satiric novel Sandition, but abandons it because of declining health. She dies on July 18 in Winchester and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
1818 Northanger Abbey, a social satire with overtones of (parodied) terror, and Persuasion,, about a reawakened love, are published under Austen’s brother Henry’s supervision.
Introduction
Mary Crawford is, or so it seems, the very model of a Jane Austen heroine. Spirited, warm-hearted, and, above all else, witty, she displays all the familiar Austen virtues, and she stands in need of the familiar Austen lessons as well. Like Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice (1813), she banters archly with the man she is falling in love with, and, like Elizabeth, she must learn to set aside her preconceptions in order to recognize that love. Like Emma Woodhouse, the heroine of Emma (1816), she speaks more brilliantly and speculates more dazzlingly than anyone around her, and, like Emma, she must learn to rein in the wit that tempts her at times to impropriety. But Mary Crawford is not the heroine of Mansfield Park (1814)—Fanny Price is, and therein lies the novel’s great surprise. For Fanny differs not merely from Mary, but also from our most basic expectations of what a novel’s protagonist should do and be. In Fanny, we have a heroine who seldom moves and seldom speaks, and never errs or alters.
“‘I must move,”’ Mary announces, “‘resting fatigues me’” (p. 85). Before her arrival at Mansfield, she had made a glamorous circuit of winters in London and summers at the country houses of friends, with stops at fashionable watering places in between, and at Mansfield she is no less mobile. A vigorous walker, she soon takes up riding, cantering as soon as she mounts. Fanny, by contrast, has hardly left the grounds of Mansfield since her arrival eight years before, and she is further immobilized by her weakness and timidity. A half-mile walk is beyond her, a ball, she fears, will exhaust her, and she is prostrated by headache after picking roses. She must be lifted onto the horse she was long too terrified to approach, and her exercise consists of being led by a groom.
“‘Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat,’” says Mary to her listeners, who have not, in fact, caught the joke at all (p. 54). So dazzling a talker is Mary that she must serve as her own best audience, amusing herself with witticisms the others cannot hear. With