2. Her Novels. The chronology of Miss Austen’s novels is not easy to follow, for her earliest works were the last to be published. In what follows we shall take the books approximately in their order of composition, not of publication.
Her first novel was Northanger Abbey, which was finished in 1798, but not published till 1818, after her death. The book begins as a burlesque of the Radcliffe type of the terror novel, which was then all the rage. The heroine, after a visit to Bath, is invited to an abbey, where she imagines romantic possibilities, but is in the end ludicrously undeceived. The incidents in the novel are ingloriously commonplace, and the characters flatly average. Yet the treatment is deft and touched with the finest needle-point of satiric observation. The style is smooth and unobtrusive, but covers a delicate pricking of irony that is agreeable and masterly in its quiet way. Nothing quite like it had appeared before in the novel.
In Pride and Prejudice (1797) the same methods are to be seen. We have the same middle-class people pursuing the common round. The heroine is a girl of spirit, but she has no extraordinary qualities; the pride and prejudice of rank and wealth are gently but pleasingly titillated, as if they are being subjected to an electric current of carefully selected intensity. In unobtrusive and dexterous art the book is considered to be her masterpiece.
Sense and Sensibility (1798) was her third novel, and it followed the same general lines as its predecessors. Then came a long pause, for she could find no publisher to issue her work. The first to see print was the last mentioned, which appeared in 1811. Stimulated to further effort, in quick succession she wrote Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818). The latter group are of the type of the others; if there is development it is seen in the still more inflexible avoidance of anything that is unusual or startling. The novels are all much the same, yet subtly and artistically different.
3. Features of her Novels. (a) Her Plots. Her plots are severely unromantic. Her first work, beginning as a burlesque of the horrible in fiction, finishes by being an excellent example of her ideal novel. As her art develops, even the slight casualties of common life—such an incident, for example, as the elopement that appears in Pride and Prejudice—become rarer; with the result that the later novels, such as Emma, are the pictures of everyday existence. Only the highest art can make such plots attractive, and Jane Austen’s does so.
(b) Her characters are developed with minuteness and accuracy. They are ordinary people, but are convincingly alive. She is fond of introducing clergymen, all of whom strike the reader as being exactly like clergymen, though each has his own individual characteristics. She has many characters of the first class, like the servile Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, the garrulous Miss Bates in Emma, and the selfish and vulgar John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. Her characters are not types, but individuals. Her method of portrayal is based upon acute observation and a quiet but incisive irony. Her male characters have a certain softness of thew and temper, but her female characters are almost unexceptionable in perfection of finish.
(c) Her place in the history of fiction is remarkable. Her qualities are of a kind that are slow to be recognized, for there is nothing loud or garish to catch the casual glance. The taste for this kind of fiction has to be acquired, but once it is acquired it remains strong. Jane Austen has won her way to a foremost place, and she will surely keep it.
We add a short extract to illustrate her clear and careful style, her skill in handling conversation, and the quiet irony of her method.
(Catherine Morland, the heroine of the novel, is introduced to the society of Bath, where she cuts rather a lonely figure till she meets a young man called Tilney—“not quite handsome, but very near it.” The following is part of their conversation at a dance.)
After chatting some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects around them, he suddenly addressed her with—“I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent—but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.”