Jane Austen Research Paper

Jane Austen’s Word: a reading of Jane Austen’s novels shows that her materials are extremely limited in themselves. Her subject matter is limited to the manners of a small section of country-gentry who apparently never have been worried about death or sex, hunger or war, guilt or God. Jane Austen herself referred to her work as “Two inches of ivory.” In a letter to her niece, Jane Austen wrote, “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” Those three or four families are the mind we knew intimately – the landed gentry, the upper classes, the lower classes, not only the industrial masses, but also the agricultural laborers.
Narrow setting: P&P like her other novels has a narrow physical setting. The story revolves around Netherfield, Longbourn, Hunsford Parsonage, Meryton and Pemberley. There is no reference to nature itself. It is a literary irony that at a time when writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, Byron and
It is impossible that emotions can be kept out of such topics. Jane-Bingley and Elizabeth-Darcy relationships are all examples of passions and emotions. The passions do appear in her novels; they must be controlled and concealed in Jane Austen’s world. It is a test of character that he is overwhelmed with emotions, but he doesn’t distress other people by a display of feelings. Norman Sherry says that she deals with emotions which are experienced in a social framework. Jane Austen believed in the organic unity of the society and therefore, the individual must not display his passions but subordinate it to the larger purpose of society. The characters in her novels thus experience emotion and strong feelings but they are brought under the control of reason. Periods of solitude and contemplation are the habitual reactions of her heroines to moments of stress. The alternative is exercise or