Jane Austen's Families, livre ebook

“Jane Austen’s Families” provides insight into family dynamics in Jane Austen’s six novels, focusing particularly on interaction between parents and children. 

“Jane Austen’s Families” discusses the fictional families – such as the Bennets and the Bertrams – whose dynamics are crucial both to Austen’s plots and to her explorations of ethical complexities. The study focuses upon the central characters’ interactions with their own families and (to a lesser extent) with other family groups in an exploration of how emotional and moral development is both hindered and fostered by these interactions. Significantly, Austen chooses not to write about the orphaned heroines so often preferred by novelists of the period; rather, for a writer who cares intensely for what is natural and probable in fiction, the most common early experience of surviving the pains and pleasures of family life provides the richest material for her work.  

This study is historically grounded, reading Austen in the context of contemporary writing and visual culture in an exploration of her treatment of the relations between parent and child.  It examines Austen’s heroines as their parents’ daughters, responding to and resisting their upbringing, and shows how family interactions shape their courtships.  Inevitably this concern involves a consideration both of the ethics of parenthood and of the ethics these heroines acquire from their parents, through adaptation, imitation and resistance to what they are taught, directly and indirectly. Interactions between parent and child affect both the daughter’s experience and her active moral life.

Acknowledgements; References and Abbreviations; General Introduction; PART I: FAMILY DYNAMICS: Introduction; Chapter One: The Functions of the Dysfunctional Family: “Northanger Abbey,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice”; Chapter Two: Spoilt Children: “Pride and Prejudice,” “Mansfield Park” and “Emma”;  Chapter Three: “Usefulness and Exertion”: Mothers and Sisters in “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” “Emma” and “Persuasion”; PART II: FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS: Introduction; Chapter Four: Money, Morals and “Mansfield Park”; Chapter Five: Speech and Silence in “Emma”; Chapter Six: Dandies and Beauties: The Issue of Good Looks in “Persuasion”; Conclusion: “Creative Attention”;  Notes; Select Bibliography; Index