III.

Early Works

After her literary experiments as a teenager, Austen had two periods of busy and fruitful writing. The first lasted from 1795 to 1798. During this time she wrote the first versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey.

Austen’s family preserved the writing she did as a teenager, which was published more than a century after her death as Love & Freindship and Other Early Works. It includes the story “Love and Freindship” [sic], which Austen completed when she was about 15 years old. It is a comic parody of 18th-century melodramatic fiction.

The main theme of Austen’s first full novel, Sense and Sensibility, is that sensibility—responsiveness, openness, enthusiasm—is highly desirable, but that it must be tempered by good sense and prudence. In other words, a person needs both sense and sensibility for fulfillment and survival. Nineteen-year-old Elinor Dashwood, the elder of the two sisters at the center of the story, combines both qualities; her 16-year-old sister, Marianne, is less balanced.

The novel focuses on the romantic affairs of the two sisters. When Marianne sprains her ankle on a hillside in a rainstorm and handsome John Willoughby rescues her, she follows her heart and passionately responds to what she believes is his courtship. He, however, breaks off the relationship when he learns that Marianne is not rich. In the meantime, Elinor becomes involved with a young man of integrity, Edward Ferrars, who, unknown to her, in a foolish moment of his youth had become secretly engaged to a woman whom he did not love. Both heroines suffer, but Elinor bears her suffering stoically while Marianne dramatizes hers, playing the role of the jilted maiden. Elinor is ultimately rewarded with a happy marriage to Edward while Marianne eventually accepts the proposal of the dull though loyal Colonel Brandon.

In Sense and Sensibility Austen challenges her readers and her characters to look closely at all facets of an individual’s personality. In so doing, Austen has been criticized for creating characters who are morally good, but too flawed to be appealing. For instance, Elinor may strike an ideal balance between sense and sensibility, but she also can strike the reader as cold and judgmental. Austen recognized that real people are flawed in significant ways, and so she did not permit the characters in her romances to drift too far from life.

Pride and Prejudice is Austen’s first undoubted masterpiece. The book focuses on the Bennet family and the search of the Bennet daughters for suitable husbands. Austen illuminates the topic of husband hunting and marriage in an acquisitive society and shows most of its aspects and consequences—comic, trivial, sensual, opportunistic, desperate, and hopeless. The story follows Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, both of whom are romantic and intelligent, as they are forced to give up their personal pride and prejudices before they can enter into a happy relationship together.

As do Austen’s earlier writings, Pride and Prejudice displays the themes of appearance versus reality, and impulse versus deliberation. Elizabeth, trusting her own impulses, makes a mistake about Darcy and his apparent arrogance that deliberation and further experience eventually cause her to correct. Of Elizabeth, Austen wrote: “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her...I do not know.”

In contrast to Elizabeth, her father, Mr. Bennet, is the book’s example of what it means to live with one’s mistakes. When he was courting Mrs. Bennet, her beauty blinded him to her silliness. Another character, Charlotte Lucas, scared of spinsterhood, deliberately chooses to ignore personal desire and the basic requirements of a good marriage according to every Austen novel—friendship and respect—and she marries for security and social status only.

Northanger Abbey—the novel originally titled Susan—parodies the exaggerated, mystery-filled and horror-filled Gothic novel form. The story is about Catherine Morland, a gullible and naive girl who enjoys reading Gothic novels. With the help of Henry Tilney, Catherine learns that real-life villains, specifically Henry’s social-climbing father, are characterized by mundane nastiness rather than melodramatic Gothic violence, and that extremely charming people, specifically Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe, can withdraw their affections as quickly as they offer them. Northanger Abbey is a novel of sustained and sparkling inventiveness, displaying the accurate and ironic social and psychological observation that also shows up in Austen’s mature fiction.