Jane Austen as a
novelist has stringently set her limits which she seldom oversteps. She was
amazingly aware of which side her genius lay and she exploited it accordingly
without any false notions of her capabilities or limitations. As Lord David
Cecil points out, she very wisely stayed "within
the range of her imaginative inspiration." Her imaginative inspiration
was as severely limited as, for example, Hardy's or Arnold Bennett's. Her
themes, her characters, her background setting -everything has a well-etched
range within which she works, and works exquisitely. Jane Austen herself referred to her work as “Two
inches of ivory.” In a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, Jane
Austen wrote, “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work
on.”
Although she works on a very small canvas,
yet she has widened the scope of fiction in almost all its directions. Her
stories are mostly indoor actions where only family matters are discussed.
However, her plots are perfect and characterization is superb.
Critics have labeled her novels belonging to a
narrow range of themes and characterization. Even in her limited world, Austen restricts herself to
the depiction of a particular class of country gentry. She excludes the matters
of lower class and hardly touches aristocracy. For instance, she has discussed
Lady Catherine only for the purpose of satire. The same sort of story is repeated, subject matters are very much the
same in all her novels, confined to the landed gentry – Servants, laborers and yeomanry rarely appear in her novels. Her nephew James
Austen-Leigh, alludes to her limited range: “She was always
careful not to meddle with matters with which she did not thoroughly
underst. There is no terrible happening in Jane
Austin’s novels. Everything happens in a civilized manner. The extreme severity
in “Pride and Prejudice” is elopement of Lydia with Wickham.
Charlotte Bronte was constrained to
observe about Jane Austen:
"She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs
him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her : she
rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood."
Charlotte Bronte believes that Jane Austen is
not concerned with the deep morals and she is an author of the surface only: “Her business is not half so much with the
human heart as with the human eye, mouth, hands and feet.”
Andrew H. Wright points out that there is
very little religion discussed in her novels, politics is not mentioned too. There
are no adventures found in her books, no abstract ideas and no discussion of
spiritual or metaphysical issues.
Macaulay declares that her characters are commonplace, “yet they are all as perfectly
discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human
beings.”
Sir Walter Scott appreciates the precision of her Art
and its merit:“That young lady has a
talent for describing the involvement of feelings and characters of ordinary
life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with.”
G.H. Lewes pays glowing tribute to her:“First and foremost, let Jane Austen be
named, the greatest artist that has ever written... Her circle may be
restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb, and vital sphere.”
Pride and Prejudice like her other novels has
a narrow physical setting in which she lived. The story revolves around
Netherfield, Longbourn, Hunsford, Meryton and Pemberley. It seems to be an irony of the history that
when the Romantic Poets were discovering the beauties of nature, Jane Austen
confined her characters within the four walls of the drawing room. Her heroines
also famously never leave the family. Edward Fitzgerald states: “She never goes out of the Parlour.”
Jane Austen’s limitations stemmed from the choice of her themes:
love, marriage and courtship. All of her six novels deal with same theme of
love and marriage. There are pretty girls waiting for eligible bachelors to be
married to.
Another limitation is the feminization of her
novels. Men do not appear except in the company of women. All the information
about Darcy is proved through Elizabeth’s point of view. Hence, the reader
looks at Darcy through Elizabeth’s eye
However her novels are profound in the
psychological delineation of her characters. She is able to capture superbly,
the subtlety of thoughts and reflexes of her characters. We can sum up above discussion in the words
of Virginia Woolf: “Jane Austen is the mistress of a much deeper
emotion than appears on the surface.”