Styles and themes of Jane Austen

Austen extends her critique by highlighting social hypocrisy through irony; she often creates an ironic tone through free indirect speech in which the thoughts and words of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator.

[1] Her interest in these comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of novelist Frances Burney and playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan and David Garrick,[2] continued less overtly throughout her professional career.

[7] As Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain in their seminal work, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Austen makes fun of "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents".

[8] "She [Lady Bertram] was a woman who spent her days in sitting, nicely dressed, on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework, of little use and no beauty, thinking more of her pug than her children, but very indulgent to the latter when it did not put herself to inconvenience ..."[9] Irony is one of Austen's most characteristic and most discussed literary techniques.

[12] Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

As Austen scholar Jan Fergus explains, "the major structural device in Pride and Prejudice is the creation of ironies within the novel's action which, like parallels and contrasts, challenge the reader's attention and judgment throughout, and in the end also engage his feelings.

"[23] Compared to other early 19th-century novels, Austen's have little narrative or scenic description—they contain much more dialogue, whether spoken between characters, written as free indirect speech, or represented through letters.

[24] For example, in Pride and Prejudice, which began as an epistolary novel, letters play a decisive role in the protagonist's education[25] and the opening chapters are theatrical in tone.

[26] Austen's conversations contain many short sentences, question and answer pairs, and rapid exchanges between characters, most memorable perhaps in the witty repartee between Elizabeth and Darcy.

"[34] Austen's prose also repeatedly contains "a relatively small number of frequently-used words, mainly epithets and abstract nouns indicating personal qualities—qualities, that is, of character and temperament rather than outward appearance".

Seeing Austen as a polemicist against sensibility, Butler argues that she avoided "the sensuous, the irrational, [and] the involuntary types of mental experience because, although she cannot deny their existence, she disapproves of them.

In an early review of Emma, Scott himself praised Austen's ability to copy "from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader ... a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him".

Health (good or bad) is an important part of the characterization of many of Austen's principal characters, and beginning with Mansfield Park becomes a crucial element in the unfolding of her plots.

Those characters who read superficially to accumulate knowledge for the purpose of displaying their grasp of culture (such as Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice), or of flaunting their social status, do not benefit from this moral growth.

[70] According to one important interpretation, Austen can be considered a "conservative Christian moralist"[71] whose view of society was "ultimately founded in religious principle".

For example, Persuasion "is subtly different from the laxer, more permissive social atmosphere of the three novels Jane Austen began before 1800"[91] and contains more frequent references to Providence.

Tory feminism, which includes such writers as Mary Astell and Dorothy Wordsworth, is a tradition of thought which recognized that "women were treated as an inferior class in a man's world".

They are not, especially in the later novels, allowed to get married at all until the heroes have provided convincing evidence of appreciating their qualities of mind, and of accepting their power of rational judgement, as well as their good hearts.

In their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), noted feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that the literary world is dominated by men and their stories, and that Austen recognized and critiqued this.

As Gilbert and Gubar explain, "Austen examines the female powerlessness that underlies monetary pressure to marry, the injustice of inheritance laws, the ignorance of women denied formal education, the psychological vulnerability of the heiress or widow, the exploited dependency of the spinster, the boredom of the lady provided with no vocation".

While her depictions of Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice include descriptions of their physical reactions to each other, which was unusual at the time,[119] the climactic moments of this and her other novels are presented from a distance.

[125] Butler contends that "Austen's stress upon her heroines' subordinate role in a family, upon their dutifulness, meditativeness, self-abnegation and self-control, were codes shared with other conservative writers, especially women moralists such as Jane West and Mary Brunton.

"[133] He gives as examples such flawed representatives of the status quo as Sir Walter Elliot, Sir Thomas Bertram and Emma Woodhouse's father; Austen's admiration of the Navy as an avenue of social mobility (the Crofts and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion); and her sympathetic portrayal of characters who are "in trade" or newly risen from it (Bingley and the Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice, the Westons and Frank Churchill in Emma).

And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.

He argued that "England was surveyed, evaluated, made known, whereas 'abroad' was only referred to or shown briefly without the kind of presence or immediacy lavished on London, the countryside, or northern industrial centers such as Manchester or Birmingham.

"[136] Specifically, "Thomas Bertram's slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously necessary to the poise and the beauty of Mansfield Park, a place described in moral and aesthetic terms" but it is rarely mentioned.

Some critics, such as Reginald Ferrar, D. W. Harding and Marvin Mudrick,[f] have argued that Austen's style is detached; her work is ironically distanced and subtly subverts the prevailing values of her society.

[158] In the section of her book devoted to Austen, Armstrong compares and contrasts Emma with Richardson's Pamela and contends that the novel demonstrates the power of language to construct and deconstruct communities and selves.

[159] As Wiltshire has observed, "middle class" British society in Austen's time placed a premium on outward decorum, manners and the limitation of emotional distress to "private" life.

Elizabeth and Emma search for replacement father figures in ways that suggest "why female survival depends on gaining male approval and protection".