Jane Austen and Her Works

This volume, penned in 1880 by the prolific Victorian novelist Sarah Tytler, stands as a remarkable artifact of Austen's critical recovery. Written six decades after Austen's death, when her works were still being rediscovered and championed, Tytler's study offers both biography and literary appreciation. What distinguishes this work is Tytler's position as a working woman writer herself, she approaches Austen not as a distant subject but as a fellow artist navigating the literary marketplace. Tytler traces Austen's development from the earliest juvenile manuscripts through the published masterpieces, illuminating how a clergyman's daughter in rural Hampshire quietly revolutionized the English novel. She examines the satirical precision, the psychological depth, and the delicate machinery of works like Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility, novels that exposed the tyranny of social niceties and the comedy of self-deception. The book situates Austen within her familial world, emphasizing the intimate circle that nurtured her talent, while arguing for her lasting importance as an observer of human nature. For readers interested in the history of literary reputation, this volume reveals how Victorian women writers themselves helped construct the Austen we now revere.