The Influence of Jane Austen's Personal Life Experiences on Her Novel Sense and Sensibility

1. Introduction

Jane Austen, as a woman novelist, has only a total of six masterpieces in her lifetime, which are constantly rising in popularity and achieving top ten status in literature. In her novels, she not only has profound insights into the psychology of the characters but also possesses a sharp understanding of the different societal rules regarding truth and falsehood, along with the corresponding consequences for the characters. Most of her characters and settings are inextricably intertwined with her creator, and it seems that her personal experiences have influenced their portrayal in the characters or social structure of the novels. In the research on Jane Austen, scholars have concluded that there is a certain connection between the author's experiences in the real world and the creation of her novels. It has now become a hot topic in the study of Jane Austen to examine whether this connection is worth discussing.

Jane Austen's fiction, like her life, strikes a nice, middle-class compromise between irreproachability and trepidation, and her delicately balanced accommodation with life, in turn, made her the first English writer able to create immortal literature. She not only portrayed the public events that were heard and talked about without being crushed by them but also gave a permanent place in the English novel to an ordinary conversation over tea cups. Judging from her artistic performance, Jane Austen seems to be a genius adept at depicting social life or a master of describing female characters. Both characters have their own values, but which aspect do her characters reflect: her personal growth or experiences? In my opinion, the life of Jane Austen, from the circumstances or form of life before or after her written art, is reflected in her character creation, but in a deeper way. It is interesting to find this connection between Jane Austen's personal life and her novels for further exploration of the themes of her works, to support the reasoning for this thesis.

1.1. Background of Jane Austen

Jane Austen lived from 1775 to 1817. As one of the youngest children in a well-connected family, she was perhaps a little spoiled. She was born and grew up in Hampshire, UK, where her family was associated with a number of estates. The family features strongly in her novels, and the heroines of two of her novels were born in the same year she was. Her early life was marked by wide learning and the self-conscious cultivation of a mind, an upbringing that was one with themes such as 'natural aristocracy' and 'politeness,' which were then gaining popularity among social observers. After her father retired from the rectory at Steventon, the family moved to Bath, a fashionable town close to the coast. Jane Austen disliked it, writing shortly after their move that she hoped people of fashion would "dislike it, hate it, and stay away, thereby preventing its becoming a city."

She was tutored at home like her close friend, who may have served as the model for a character in one of her novels and had a nearly identical education. At this time, women of Jane's class were generally poorly educated, and it is asserted that Austen's heavy reading at home took the place of a university education. She grew up in a society where marriages were commonly arranged for money or social connections rather than love. Her great aunt was married off that way, and her brother married someone for money. Young women were expected to spend most of their time sewing — an activity very often deemed something low, tedious, morbid, and repetitious. Both of her brothers became admirals, and her father's hobbies included reading and writing, so there were many sources of information in the naval that could have influenced her. Hers was the first generation to marry for love, and there is evidence she did so even though she needed money. Her husband belonged to an admiral's family and had a large enough navy pension for them to live on. Jane died at about the age of 41, but she wrote for 21 years. While other biographers fill in their accounts of Jane Austen with a great deal of historical detail, we can jump from here to a description of the changes and conflicts that characterized the years between Austen's earliest work on an epistolary novel she never finished and when she began 'Sense and Sensibility.' She read a novel in 1798, nearly 20 years after it was published and when she was 22 at a small country rectory where her father was constantly busy. She spent many hours reading this and reread it four times aloud, and her family began to fear she was deserting her more private reading for it. It is noted that the novel was influential on her because by the end of 1798, she began writing her first conscious novels (as opposed to attempts), "Elinor and Marianne" and "First Impressions," which would later become "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," but it's likely that they were a result of both her own experiences thus far and her reading. It is emphasized the way in which Austen wanted her parents to read her work and how she started to write it out of boredom and wariness of the long vacation that lay ahead of her.

2. Literary Analysis of Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility is a novel inherently characterized by the contrasts between its characters, its impetus towards these stark lines as they might be drawn between opposing emotions and, more grand-scale, opposing philosophical perspectives quite literally reflected in its title. Elinor Dashwood and her younger sister Marianne represent the senses of impulse and practicality. Throughout the novel, these characters struggle romantically, are cursed by the oppressive notion of societal expectation, and the resulting health complications and revelatory transcendences enthrall the characters at the novel's core.

The novel is structured around dialogue, the gradual enhancement of the reader's understanding of each character, and a focus on setting that subjects these naturalistically constructed characters to places, their economic and physical class, exactly as they would have been in the Regency era. But where Austen's attention to these identifiers, characters themselves, might be called equal, it is hardly disinterested, for the setting influences the psyche of every character she describes. It is through the characters' coping with, repudiation of, or reluctant acquiescence to their surroundings that Austen explores love and sentimentality, the home and the journey, action and inaction.

Attention to the novel's eponymous themes and character construction already offers much in the way of philosophy and requires some philosophical analysis to fully understand them. It is primarily on the concept of two generalized traits that cannot so easily be separated in the actions and people of life together that this novel is based. Although the defining of affection and sense allows for an intricate analysis of the distinctions of these two formats of affection, this approach shall be set aside in favor of an encompassing one, to truly begin to see how Austen so subtly and philosophically observes differing motivations in the pair of sisters.

2.1. Plot Summary

The story follows the household of Mr. Dashwood, which includes his second wife, three daughters, and a son from a previous marriage. Mr. Dashwood passes away, and according to the laws of primogeniture then in place, his estate is transferred to his son when he comes of age. His wife and three unmarried daughters, Marianne, Elinor, and Margaret, are left with very little money, and the son, John Dashwood, moves in with them along with his wife, Fanny. John Dashwood has also promised to help provide for his sisters' dowries. Over time, friendships and romantic ones emerge between the two very different Dashwood sisters, and actions, reactions, encouragement, and misdeeds by friends and suitors are played out on the page. There are outings and travels, as well as marriage proposals, secret engagements, and heartache.

In the end, through another case of unexpected patronage, Elinor is matched with Edward, and Marianne is married to Colonel Brandon. The love and loyalty that exist in both couples from the start of the story to the finish have a hand in influencing the outcome of the motivations and actions in the story too. The romantic heroes in the story are Colonel Brandon, a retired military man, a good 35-40 years of age; Edward Ferrars, a young man barely out of college with no established career or vocation; and Mr. John Willoughby, a young military man. The three romantic heroines are Elinor Dashwood, her younger sister Margaret Dashwood, and her younger sister Marianne Dashwood. Marianne draws both Colonel Brandon’s and Willoughby’s fleeting romantic attraction, yet she refuses to reveal her own true affections openly for any man at all. The actions of criticizing Marianne’s choice in clothing, romantic sensibilities, as well as Colonel Brandon’s life choices and silences in the story also silently question the worthiness of Marianne’s character.

3. Exploring Jane Austen's Personal Life

Investigating Jane Austen as a person is crucial for understanding her novels. Specifically, her experiences with love, family life, and the time period in which she lived are often mirrored in her novels. When examining Jane Austen personally, one cannot overlook the importance she placed on her family relationships. Austen was part of a large family and had six brothers and one sister. The youngest two Austen daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth, were Louisa's younger sisters. The deaths of their brothers at a young age led to an even closer sisterhood in the Austen home. Not only are close sisterhoods depicted in typical domestic narratives, but many of her novels show different familial relationships. Elinor and Marianne are close, but also supportive and critical of each other. Their familial relationships often help to define other characters in the novel, as well as themselves.

Destiny is usually related not only to family, but also to one's interactions, especially romantic interactions. Austen's early work is considered by some critics to be a study in libertine seduction, which garnered the novel a hasty and unsuccessful rejection due to its challenging nature. Austen's own romantic life was more than likely the nucleus of at least one of her literary works; closely mirrors the story of her early love. Three of her novels were published with 'By A Lady' as their author during her lifetime. The love affair between Elinor and Edward Ferrars is reflective of Austen's deep love interests and the circumstances of her entanglements. Austen's relationship with Tom Lefroy, despite the fact that they met when Austen was a young woman of seventeen and the children of dear family friends, was by no means unproblematic. Such a relationship certainly carried future implications. The circles of the gentry and more substantial yeomanry into which he moved, both at home and in Hampshire, did little to color his singularly cold and reserved character. Overall, careful precision and scant biography, particularly with regard to such a mature artist, wealthy with mature sight, leaves the result necessarily weak. Our understanding, in the end, will consist purely of the feeling we can find together in the autobiography and the novels.

3.1. Family Dynamics

A family in Georgian England was the most significant socializing unit a person could find. A religious group, social set, and economic unit, they have a considerable impact on a person and a person's relationships. If one feels the need to understand Jane Austen's values and world, it becomes necessary to discover what family and familial interactions were behind her portraits in Sense and Sensibility. Austen’s own family dealt in the mutual care of its members. Her parents married for happiness. They did not follow the more popular and financially attractive custom of arranging their children’s matches when Jane observed, "couples can be thrown together, when it would be a great deal better for them to be ever asunder."

Austen’s sisters wrote letters every Friday. Aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews delighted in each other’s company, value, and spirit. This makes the family history included throughout her various stories more than just an arbitrary cameo in the lives of the characters Austen paints. "Families of sisters" and sibling group relationships are quite common fare in early Austen works; however, it is her portrait in Sense and Sensibility that deserves detailed inspection. After all, Marianne’s tears, Elinor’s steadfastness, Margaret’s comedic intervals, and even Lucy Steele’s manipulations helped to mirror the patterns in Austen’s own life. "Sense will always have attractions to me, Marianne," insists the older, strength-based daughter to her little sister in the first chapter of the book, "to your inclination it will not." The gentle sway of love and conflict, flexibility equals frustration, loyalty balances individuality, and tension leads to eventual bliss is the truth of familial connections found once the final chapter ends. Such truths sparked memories of her parents' marriage or her own experiences with siblings and helped define her approach to literature in England.

4. Comparative Analysis with Other Works

A Comparative Analysis of Sense and Sensibility The focus of Sense and Sensibility on the choice of a partner and the security of an individual based on such a choice provides a context to compare it with Pride and Prejudice. Moreover, the time of publication of these two works was merely three years apart from each other, which also enables a biographical thematic comparison of both works in terms of the evolution of the author herself. What further substantiates this analysis is the resemblance of recurring thematic connections within Austen’s body of works. What draws other characters in Pride and Prejudice, another separately identifiable work exemplary of Austen’s, is her new narrative technique and her wholly original characters. Thus, it is possible to extrapolate this same portrayal within her first work. By such a juxtaposition, Elizabeth Bennet is portrayed as a unique character in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice right from the very beginning, which leads to the indirect acknowledgment of the fact that Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is not this kind of unique individual in the first place. Although, to be precise, this does not mean to make the character types of both sisters within the novels alike or similar to each other; it only denotes the situations each is placed in as opposed to the other and the different evaluations of the social situations they had each been placed in. The development of Austen’s own narrative art could also be taken and tested in this respect. Given a close aspect and the interconnection of a woman’s emotional and evaluative state and the narrative art, this could be regarded as confronted with the author’s early emotional states when she had just learned of her sister’s marriage.

4.1. Pride and Prejudice

While not technically a sequel, Pride and Prejudice can be compared and contrasted to Sense and Sensibility. Guardianship, class, and love are some of the major concerns in these early novels, but the in-depth information that Pride and Prejudice provides prior to the two main protagonists actually meeting raises the exploration of them to a significantly greater extent than Sense and Sensibility.

Similar to how Sense and Sensibility uses differing personality traits to highlight social tensions due to financial demands, as the novel's title suggests, Pride and Prejudice contrasts qualities of pride and prejudice to tutor Elizabeth about Darcy's true nature. Primarily, the relationship between Elinor Dashwood, the oldest and most sensible of the three sisters, and Elizabeth Bennet, with her lively and quick-witted humor, harks back to the question of how people make sense of the world and their way of behaving in it. Darcy and Elizabeth are, therefore, defined by their own beliefs and serious self-opinions, as both are reactive characters that are given to arrive at more careful decisions when held in high-pressure situations, such as when Darcy surprises Elizabeth by proposing when her mother is out of the way, as opposed to heroes who would prefer to spend time rethinking their futures. As in Sense and Sensibility, each main protagonist dismisses love based on first impression; Elinor accepts this rejection of love developed over a decade with little outward acknowledgment of the painful sacrifice, whereas Elizabeth shrugs her pain off and leans towards making the best of things rather than behaving in complete despair. Also, Lady Catherine de Bourgh serves to represent the opinions of those in society who believed it was not possible for women to be guided by sensible understanding rather than by prejudice.

5. Conclusion and Implications for Literary Studies

In conclusion, the evidence and arguments in this essay clearly show that Jane Austen’s writing career was significantly impacted by the experiences that she and her family endured during the two years of transition from Steventon to Bath. The serious life events, such as her father’s failing health and the financial hit they would take when they moved, as well as the smaller daily changes, certainly influenced Jane Austen, as they would anyone. It seems likely that Austen would have absorbed some of those concerns and feelings she experienced into her sense. Hopefully, the conclusion will be ingrained in the minds of everyone interested in literary critique, including contemporary readers and analysts of Austen and literary studies in general: the context within which the author is living when a work is produced often has a significant effect on the craft and content of literature. This new view of “sense” that I hope becomes popular for contemporary readers of Austen has several implications for literary studies. It is interesting to see more comprehensive references to the contexts in which authors produced their works and the real nature of biographical criticism, and to neglect such references to other types of historical contexts and tools for deeper understanding. Biographical tools and contextualizations in literary studies are often viewed as a “subject”; however, due to the strong influence of an author, a critique may also choose to view the contexts of the biographical approaches as being essential and worthy of consideration. I am not in favor of tossing the baby out with the bathwater, but I believe it’s worth reiterating. In conclusion, the biographical and reiterative prologues of the postulator have the potential to add depth to the narrative fiction of any author, to any degree – from nothing to everything. Furthermore, while no further biographical research into Austen’s life may necessarily conform to the revelations of Sense and Sensibility, there is a wealth of other novels and personal circumstances to pursue for study.