Jane Austen and her sarcasm

Jane Austen the author of great works such as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey was born on 16 December 1775. She was a British novelist who was well known and who is read to this day due to her realism, social commentary, use of free indirect speech and irony.

Austen's father, George Austen, and his wife, Cassandra, were members of substantial gentry families. Austen's immediate family was large and close-knit. There were six brothers-James, George, Charles, Francis, Henry, and Edward. The eldest of the family was Cassandra, who was Austen's closest friend. From her brothers she felt closer to Henry who became her literary agent and provided Austen with a view of social worlds not normally visible from a small parish in rural Hampshire.

She was educated mostly at home by her father and brothers and through her own reading. Austen's apprenticeship as a writer lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty five years old, during which, she wrote and revised three major novels.

With the well-received publication of her novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Austen became a professional writer.

She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and began writing a third, eventually titled Sanditon. But she died before they could be published. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were issued after her death in 1817, while Sanditon remains uncompleted.

She was not lucky enough to get the due fame, during her life time and her novels attracted the attention of the general public after her nephew published Memoir of the Life of Jane Austen. In fact much insight in to her writing, can be acquired through her letters. She has written some 3,000 letters, of which most were destroyed.

Through these letters it was evident that she was not very different from other young ladies at the time. It was said that she had a love affair with some man, before he mysteriously disappeared from her life.

In the second half of the twentieth century her works were explored in all avenues of artistic, ideological, and historical import. Currently, Austen's works are one of the most written-about and debated. Austen was obviously against the novels of 'sensibility' of the eighteenth century and was a part of the transition to nineteenth century 'realism'.

As exemplified by Pride and Prejudice, a must read for all literature lovers, she tries to highlight the fact that women of her society were extremely dependant on marriage for social and economic security, in spite of her plots almost always being rather comic.

Most of her novels dealt with morality and social conventions. Her special talent in incorporating sarcasm into her novels is never more evident than in the opening line of Pride and Prejudice - "It's a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Jane Austen died of what was believed to have been Addison's disease on 18, July 1817.