Discuss the limited range of Jane Austen as a novelist.

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Jane Austen’s range was extremely limited but within her range, she was an exquisite artist working on he “two inches irony”. Discuss this statement with illustrations from Pride and Prejudice’ in support of your arguments.

Point out the limitations of Jane Austen as a novelist with reference to Pride and Prejudice.

Discuss the limited range of Jane Austen as a novelist.

There is no doubt that Jane Austen is a great novelist from all accounts and considerations. It is singularly judicious that she form no violent estimates of people which is scrupulously fair in he pictures. There are no extremes in her nature. Her general attitude was mild and remained the same throughout her life span of forty one years. Jane Austen’s view of life is not extensive. She paints pictures of that life which she sees her close range. The secret of her power lies in the complete mastery. She has as an artist, over her material. She is alive to her limitation and she never touches a character or scene, which she does not know thoroughly. She never invents a story or personage which she does not subject to such minutely intimate treatment that it appears a fragment of autobiography. Perhaps, the seeret of her success lies here in. Her novels have the tattles and trivialties of life in a small country, town where tea-time is an exciting ta event and subscription ball is a crisis in one’s career.

The range of Jane Austen is singularly limited as she does not attempt any wide or wilde sweeps in matters of time, place, people of F action. She is sympathetic and tolerant towards the poor and does not have a faintest weakness for the aristocrat and well-to-do. She is not a social reformer and keeps the under world outside her novels. There is an absence of simulation of feeling. She ridicules folly but excuses sins and judges men and women by their opportunities in their life. Her knowledge about her limitations can be clarified by an example of his life.

Once, the librarian of Prince Rejent, James Slainer Clark, Suggested to Jane Austen to portray a clergyman. Jane Austen replied that she might do justice to the comic part of it, but certainly not to the good, the enthusiastic and the literary part of the character. A clergyman, necessarily deals with science and philosophy and host of other things which are beyond her powers of delineation and depiction. When the same Mr. Clarke made another suggestion to deal with the historical romance connected with the House of Coburg, Jane Austen encountered, “I could not more write than an epic poem. I could sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any motive than to save my life……. I am sure I should be hanged I had finished the first Chapter. No. I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way.”

Jane Austen’s entire life, which was only 41 years, was passed in villages and small towns with very rare visits to London and her life was singularly uneventful. She belonged to a middle class family of rural gentry of South England in her novels. She was familiar with the domestic and social life and relationship of this limited world and naturally these find mentioned in her novels.

Jane Austen’s characters like her ownself, belong to very ordinary middle class family. Her male characters do not have any soaring ambitions and the female characters accept their social position and keep themselves busy with matrimonial persuits. Pride and Prejudice’ confirms this. There are no great villains, great saints eccentries, cynics or passionate people in her stories. Her main characters are young girls of marriageable age or young men single and with fortune. Jane, Elizabeth, Lydia, Charlotte are female characters where as Bingley. Darcy, Collins, Backham are male characters. Her characters even when they are silly affected, like Collins, Mrs. Bennet, Lady Catherine, are also respectable. The greatest villainly in her novels is an occasional elopement, but no abductions. Even such villainous events are set right in the course of events. There is no crowding of characters. Jane Austen, it is said rarely moves out of popular.

Life in Jane Austen’s novels, as we see in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is singularly calm and eventful. Jane Austen is a stranger to strong passion and for this reason, we do not find the giddy heights of romantic love or abysmal depths of dismal despair and frustration in her novels. She is essentially a comic and not tragic artist. She is blissfully ignorant of the the vehement, the profound and the enthusiastic, and all that can disturb the smooth and placid routine of daily rural life. With great care and skill, she concentrates on painting the surface of life, the external character and manner. The emotions of pity, love and hatred are there but restrained, not violent. It is for this reason that Jane Austen has been termed classic and not romantic.

While nobody, artists or critics, deny that her range is limited but many admire her skill of working with such exquisite art within that cramped range. But there are others who complains that she never steps out of her parlour and Garrod finds monotonous unity of her material.

Summing up, it may be said that Jane Austen knows her limitations better than her characters and that too much before she put the pen to paper. It is a real stroke of genius that she decides to work on “Two inches of irony” and refuses to enlarge the surface. Her canvas is small but she works such fineness and artistry that amazes the discerning art critics and literary connoisseurs. She is the envy of many artists and they pay rich tributes to her genius. According to Sarah Coleridge, “She is the most faultless of women novelists of England.” Thomas Babington Macaulay also records his great admiration for her genius.