Similarity Between Pride And Prejudice And Persuasion

1.4 Literature overview

At the end of the nineteen century, was published a book, for the first time, concerning Jane Austen’s literary work. Exactly in 1890, the writer Godwin Smith gave for printing Life of Jane Austen, and from then he started a new era which values the author’s literary legacy, so others begun to write critics; thus, this moment marked the first step of the authorized criticism, focused on Austen’s writing style. In conformity with B.C. Southam Critical Heritage, the criticism attributed to Jane had increased after 1870 and became formal and organized. Therefore, “we see the novels praised for their elegance of form and their surface ‘finish’; for the realism of their fictional world, the variety and vitality of their characters;

In the same time, these literary works have differences, for the most part because the latter underlines the evolution in Jane’s writing style and ideas determined by satirical images of the high-class, and appoints a novel, typical for the mature stage of her career, while Pride and Prejudice is a model of her beginning as a writer. The first novel shapes the middle-class society (the Bennet family, their relatives, and neighbors), in an accurate way, especially because the author belonged to it; she spend her entire life in this social circle, and her continually encounters with its members provided her, those well painted details. Thus, Austen is perfectly aware of the desires and aspirations of the women and men in this class. Those people were craving to overcome their social status, they were in constant search of means which could endow them, and so they were capable of many things to achieve their purposes. Therefore, the main characters of this novel, the Bennet family, who were having five unmarried daughters, were struggling to assure their future, by marrying them in the upper-class: A single man of large fortune; four of five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls! (Austen, 1970:2). However, the second novel has in front the upper-class

Also, the analysis of her literary work, which provides a faithful image of early nineteenth century social stratification, and the relationships between individuals viewed from the marriage perspective. The analysis was realized comparing two of the author’s works, Pride and Prejudice one of the first novels, and her last Persuasion, which show the reality lived by the middle and upper-class societies at that time.

In order to analyze these hypotheses, I started reading the two novels I proposed for this research paper. While reading, I observed the style of the English author, and also the matters she was writing about, especially about marriage in a society driven by the desire to overcome. Because Austen belonged to the middle-class, I noticed the details of life which she contoured so well; as a result of her gifted writing of depicting society and characters, each one of her novels has several film adaptations which prove the relevance of her