Introductory Notes. Jane Austen(1775-1817) was born into the family of an English clergyman, the seventh of his eight children

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born into the family of an English clergyman, the seventh of his eight children. She was educated in the main by her father, the minister of a small parish. She started her literary career by writing parodies and sketches for the amusement of the family but went on to become one of the most brilliant novelists in English literature. Her first twenty-six years were spent in the quiet of her father's house. In 1801 her father fell seriously ill and the family moved to Bath in an at­tempt to restore his health. After her father's death in 1805, the family eventually returned to Hampshire. This quiet, uneventful life formed one of the shrewdest writers in English literature. Jane Austen definitely had the gift of sensitive observation as well as that of quiet humour. She was very attentive to the life and man­ners of her time and her class. She completed and published six novels and left one unfinished when she died in 1817, as quietly and serenely as she had lived.

Literature, not the literary life, was always her intention. The only literary attitude she enjoyed was the one which kept her bent over the little sheets of paper while her sister Cassandra sewed and her mother, a lively woman, held her tongue. She was the complete artist; it was enough. Her literary development might be traced back to Defoe, Fielding, Richardson and Crabbe, al­though the truth is that she was unique in the art of story-telling, and came onto the scene "without ancestors and left it without progeny." The material from which she created her novels only adds to their miracle. She called it "human nature in the midland counties," By words of Ronald Blythe, her biographer and critic,

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Imagery in Translation

"the depths of her novels are not the chance things of casual ge­nius, but the results of an uncommonly sane mind, a gay heart and a most dedicated and meticulous workmanship." Her prose is always stern, though sometimes joyful and epigrammatic, but it is never poetry. Yet something always remains indefinable about her.

That "something" might be the mystery of the "quiet coun­ty life" which in reality was astonishing novel-making material, including her own experience and that of her family. Her mother was related to the Duke of Chandos and Master of Balliol. There was an aunt who was married to an admiral and a cousin, the Comtesse de Feuillide, who fled from the French Revolution in which her husband was guillotined. Elizabeth de Feuillide brought with her a small son, and in a short time she married Jane's broth­er, Henry Austen. Henry Austen's life alone might offer a wealth of material to a novelising sister. A country parson's handsome son, at the age of twenty-six, he married a French countess, one of Marie Antoinette's ladies, and thus became stepfather to the godson of the Governor General of India. He then proceeded on a career that went from a captaincy in the Oxford militia through a spell of fashionable banking to the priesthood. Is that not a novel in itself?

Her other brothers were no less extraordinary. The eldest, James, married the Duke of Lancaster's granddaughter, and it was to his child, Anna, that Jane wrote most of her letters revealing the principles of her own art. Frank and Charles, two more broth­ers, were naval officers and future admirals. Frank was a friend of Admiral Nelson. Edward Austen was adopted by a rich family, educated, and sent on the grand tour. He married a baronet's daugh­ter and became a rich heir able to support the Austen family after their father's death. Cassandra, Jane's favourite sister was a vivid and enigmatic character who loved balls, cards, wine, music, coun­try walks, conversation, children and bad as well as good novels.

Pride and Prejudice, the third of the six novels, was pub­lished in 1813. The narrative manner of this comedy of marriag-

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