Jane Austen, mostly known as the greatest novelist of manners, was born December 16th, 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, England. Her novels portray the life of the people and especially of the women of 19th century England. She raised the whole genre to a new level of art. She is known best for her depiction of the society of 19th century England her insight of women’s life of that time.
She produced some greatest novel in English. This unpretentious daughter of Hampshire did not use exhibitionist critical apparatus and no pretentiously announced model, like Richardson, in her novel. Everyone recognised her ironic taste. She had an eye of the moral judgment peppered with the irony. Her use of wit not farcical; it was polished and very controlled beneath her claim moral apprehension of the nature of human relationships. All of her characters were shown with excellent social and economic propriety.
Jane Austen was gifted with writing skills. She began writing at an early age; however, the audience of her early work was her family only. Her indulgence towards writing helped her to produce stories in which she parodied with humour and fine sense of caricature.
Her novels revolve around the daily routine errands, visits, shopping, sewing, gossip, parties, meetings, and other trivial matter. Her subject matter was extracted out of above-mentioned trivial matters, but she was able to artistically erect a strong faced off her novels from them. In her novel, one can find the serenity and beauty of her country towns. She depicted her countryside as an unspoilt place with its well-kept estates and cheerful farms. These things provided a perfect background to her novel, which portrays a perfect and calm social life.
Although her ability to deal with social issues was beyond comparison, but still she lack few major issues that were prevailing in the society of her time. During her writing career, Napoleonic wars were going on but she avoided mentioning this major social issue in her novel for a reason unknown. Most of the critics believe that Jane Austen’s comfort zone of writing was very limited and she had always avoided to expend her horizon from trivial social matters to the serious world affairs which were not relevant to the situation she wanted to write about.
Jane Austen is known as the artist of miniature art. Her horizon was limited but still she got the ability to achieve so much meaning with a simple descriptive sentence. She was a novelist of manners with a brilliant ironic wit. She confined herself to the contemporary English social life and one can say that she had depicted that period justly. Her human comedy with pronounced art has the ability to outdo even the most artistic novel of our present time.
