Jane Austen's Life and Work

The fact that Jane Austen was daughter of a clergyman and lived a comfortably genteel life in the bosom of home and family is well known. Her popular literary reputation as a comic genius and great novelist derives from keen observation of and realistic insight into the personalities and problems of people who functioned in and around the more or less limited social environment of genteel Regency society with which she was intimately familiar. Mercer characterizes Austen's life as "uneventful, placid, and circumscribed," though the evidence of her novels is that she was "highly sensitive to what went on around her" (Mercer 1). Mercer explains that Austen, an exact contemporary of such personages as Napoleon and the whole raft of personalities around the American and French Revolutions, was undoubtedly aware of, though not a direct participant in, the social ferment in early nineteenth-century Europe: "But as middle-class women's lives go, even down to our own day, hers was not limited. . . . She was at home in a world by no means provincial" (Mercer 308-9). Bush cites a letter by Jane to he

is legacy from his father, General Tilney. Catherine, meanwhile, gets a lesson in her own failure when romantic fancies about General Tilney cause her to make a major faux pas while a guest at Northanger Abbey, as she roots around the place to uncover what she convinces herself is a dark Tilney secret. Her embarrassment when revealing her objective to Henry pales in comparison to the humiliation of being expelled from the Abbey after the General has been told by John Thorpe that Catherine is a fortune-hunting poseur. If the gothic novel can be said to be an example of heightened action, adventure, and physical consequence, it is equally the case that Catherine's experience at Northanger Abbey is emotionally consequential. Catherine's humiliation at being inexplicably banished from Eleanor's friendship is aggravated by her attraction to Henry Tilney and is so great that she does not quite share the details of her expulsion with anyone at home. Bush (65-66) finds both Catherine's ill-bred investigative actions at the Abbey and the General's motivation for expelling her unconvincing; however, the evidence of the text is that people do indeed act out their boorishness in defiance of good manners. Bush himself says that Northanger Abbe