Commiserations on what would appear to be a difficult (!!) assignment. Of course it's particularly difficult for me as, formally as Jane Austen I died in 1817 in my early forties and didn't get to know anything about my talented followers Charles Dickens (born 1812 in Portsmouth but forever associated with Victorian London), Thomas Hardy (born 1840 in a Dorset reinvented as the semi-fictional 'dream-country' [his words] of 'Wessex'), or George Eliot, née Mary Anne Evans in 1819, in rural Warwickshire, the middling England of much of her fictional terrain. I myself was influenced by eighteenth-century novelists like Henry Fielding of Tom Jones, Amelia and Joseph Andrews and the Samuel Richardson of Clarissa,Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison. You may wish to note, however, that I had to change what they offered me to suit myself and to get published (tho' in my case that didn't happen until 1811, with Sense and Sensibility). Richardson offered a profound study of sensibility and female feeling(s), but wrote epistolary novels (in the form of imaginary letters). I began both Pride and Prejudice (1813) (originally First Impressions) and Sense and Sensibility (1811) (originally Elinor and Marianne) in that form, but altered them to include a narrator's voice mixed with dialogue, though without Fielding's highly intrusive and opinionated narrator.

In the matter of influence, however, I also learned from writings which didn't take the form of novels –- Sheridan's plays, for example, including The Rivals, and the writings of Dr. Johnson, the great and charitable eighteenth century man of letters and moralist. Although I was by training and formation an 'eighteenth century' novelist, the novel, by the 'Revolutionary Decade' of the 1790s, when I began writing, had got into the doldrums and had almost to re-invent itself, and I learned from many talented but inferior female novelists of the day, now almost forgotten, though one or two, like Frances Burney (Evelina) and Anne Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho), are still read.

The novelists who followed me, whom I got to know about through means I shall not reveal, are said to have taken a wider social canvas than I considered proper, although I do myself consider and include fictional people who are extremely poor even if they formally serve under the rubric 'genteel', like the Bates family in Emma (1815-16), the Dashwood girls in Sense and Sensibility , the eponymous ('naming') sisters of the unfinished The Watsons (written 1802-5 in Bath, the main city of my novels), and the Harville family in Persuasion (1818). Dickens wrote memorably and feelingly about the urban poor, George Eliot about provincial life and the unprivileged people of the English counties. Hardy, a beneficiary of the Romantic Movement, especially in poetry, wrote about humble and rustic life, as Wordsworth (1770-1850) would have liked, about the interweaving of the weather and the seasons with the world of work.

The novels of Dickens and Eliot take the impress of the Industrial Revolution as well as the Romantic Movement, and their convoluted plots – as in Middlemarch, Bleak House and Little Dorrit – to some extent mirror the complexity of a society which had grown more difficult to grasp as a whole, well as more populous, than the one I described. All sorts of language, from lower orders of society, including dialect and slang, etc., found their way into their novels in a way I hadn't allowed for or envisaged. But they derive something from, or sound like me at times. Hardy seems interestingly to be rewriting Pride and Prejudice (1813) with a strong heroine (like Elizabeth Bennet), whose marital fate is inseparable from a quest for social and financial security and a desire to rescue her impoverished family, in The Hand of Ethelberta (1876). Dickens imitates my sense of the idiosyncratic talk of characters like Miss Bates in Emma over a range of novels from Pickwick Papers (e.g. the lively Cockney voice of Sam Weller) to Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) (e.g. Mrs. Gamp). George Eliot also covers a range of expression I didn't find appropriate in works like The Mill on the Floss andAdam Bede.

The latter is a notable example of historical fiction, backdated to c. 1800 in a way my 'contemporary' fictions don't allow for. Hardy (The Trumpet-Major) and Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities) also have such fictions, and in general what these novelists who follow me, the properly Victorian ones, have that I don't is this intensely historical awareness. Of course this doesn't mean they were 'better than' I was – rather the reverse, if you ask me!

With best wishes.

Jane Austen

I'm very sorry for the slight delay in answering you. Your question sounds historical as much as literary, and a large one. I'll answer with respect to my own situation and novels. One should remember that gender is always involved with other categories, that's to say your situation and how to feel about it, and your ability to change it, depends on a number of factors, and was not simply defined by one's being a woman, or a man. My neighbour Elizabeth Chute, for example, was married to a hunting squire, with a huge house and grounds and many servants, and had cultivated herself (read French and Italian), with no need to work or exert herself greatly. She was childless and suffered from loneliness a little. Many would find her situation not unenviable, however.

I personally had a lot of sympathy for ladies whose lot was a hard one – like those of the woman servants, refugees from France, who tended my cousin Eliza de Feuillide and her mother devotedly, and the poor governess (a sort of servant teacher to rich families), Miss Sharpe. I myself was a poor female dependant, though in a highly respectable and responsible family in which 'ladies' could expect to be looked after in some degree, and the family did 'club together' to see that I and my sister Cassandra, and Mother, were given a home at Chawton and something to live on after father died.

The contrast between the social roles men and women were expected to fulfil was demonstrated by my family. My brothers made their way in the world as respectively clergyman, landowner, banker and naval officers, and two went to university. My only possibilities for real personal independence were through authorship, which not too many might succeed at (although female writers from Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffe to Mary Wollstonecraft had been making their mark, and even earning a handsome living occasionally), and teaching in a lowly way.

The situation of women is the subject of debate and reflection in my novels. Mrs Croft, the bluff Admiral's wife in Persuasion makes a plea for women to be considered as 'rational creatures', rather than delicate ones, and asks to be put on board ship with her admiral husband to 'rough it' (but have his company). On the other hand, this I now realise probably shows my own naïvety in relation to what life in the Royal Navy in the time of the Napoleonic wars would be like, given the unspeakable conditions on board ships in my day. As a secluded Hampshire spinster who became something like a professional maiden Aunt (a career for ladies?!) to my brothers' many children, I was far removed from such realities.

In Emma, the whole basis of the book is the distinction between the lot(s) [fates] of women who exist on different social levels and have such different styles of life and expectations, from old Mrs Bates the clergyman's widow and her daughter the unmarried Miss Bates with their penniless relative Jane Fairfax, who has fetched up in Highbury village and looks to be 'in for' a spot of governessing if the vulgar arriviste Mrs. Elton has anything to do with it (and her rich but careless lover Frank Churchill fails to rescue her from this 'fate worse than death' [as I sometimes seem to have considered it]). The unmarried but rich and independent Emma of Hartfield interests herself in these ladies, but she is patronising. Unlearning this patronage is a large part of the novel's theme, which might then be said to be, in part, a plea to richer relatives to treat poor-ish ladies like myself with due respect!

The theme of feminine penury and disinheritance is also treated in Sense and Sensibility, in which the intelligent Dashwood girls, with high intellectual and ethical standards, are disinherited and, one might almost say, 'abused', though rescued in the end – though it is significant that they find fulfilment through marriage; while the motor of the plot in Pride and Prejudice is the working of the entail, which will disinherit the Bennet family because there are five daughters in the family to marry and no son to inherit the property of Longbourn, which will consequently be bestowed on silly and sycophantic Mr Collins. (I made him particularly stupid just to show how iniquitous such social arrangements were!)

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

I quite take the point that you have to write a paper immediately (gulp!), and I know the feeling(s) -which may of course include pleasurable ones. I have the feeling the path to goodness and sophistication in such answers often depends on a more nuanced appreciation of the problems certain ideas and assumptions bring than most of us have time to have figured out—rather than simply in the finding of beans to spill (and spilling them!) A propos, do I have the info to help you enough here? I wonder what the exact title of your paper is, from your question it isn’t quite clear whether the basis of the study is biographical. This is always a tricky business, much more so than the unwary allow (for unwary we might put ‘all of us who read biographies’ – no priggery involved, I assure you).

Personally I particularly enjoyed Claire Tomalin’s partly because it is rather wonderfully eloquent about what you (or ‘you all’) don’t know about me, if necessarily less eloquent about theoretical problems which confront biography --problems which we are all anxious to bracket because we enjoy biographies so much. Some might say, in other words that trying to explain Emma (or Emma) through biography is an attempt to explain the known by the relatively unknown. Seen in this light, Emma might be hazarded to be a transposition of certain configurations or quandaries in my social relationships and personal experience. For example, Emma’s manipulation of feminine desire(s) and interest in “narrative outcomes” (especially marital – all my novels end with marriage[s]), her penchant for fiction(s), her hobby-horses as “imaginist” (Mr Knightley’s critical term) bring her close to my position as novelist.

Indeed, my interest in the marital fates and flirtations of nieces like my rich brother Edward’s daughter Fanny Knight has been seen as having a parallel in Emma’s “structure of feeling”, though after my death I was saddened to find Fanny patronising me in correspondence as insufficiently genteel – oh, irony of fate! as readers of Emma will exclaim to a man – or woman. If only I’d had a Mr. Knightley to tell Fanny off. So, reading life as novel or vice versa, if Emma’s behaviour has parallels in my own experience, I was much more in the position of someone likely to be on the receiving end of the social patronage Emma is capable of dispensing than of that of Emma herself, heiress of Hartfield. “A character whom no one but myself will much like” (my idea of Emma), also corresponds to the fact that people in my social position might well be expected to be patronised by the Emmas of this world.

In particular, the group of penurious females comprising the Bates household -- old Mrs Bates and garrulous daughter, the already quite old Miss Bates, and the suggestively named Jane Fairfax – suggest the socially vulnerable group of myself, widowed mother, and elder sister Cassandra. Jane, artistic, talented, with every entitlement to consideration, but at the mercy of social forces, including the whims of her fickle fiancé Frank Churchhill’s stepmother—again suggests my own giftedness and social exposure, was perhaps even part of a general plea to be well or respectfully treated.

Again, my great landowner brother Edward was roughly in the position of Mr Knightley, but his character perhaps, and tellingly, owes more to my favourite author, dear Dr. Johnson, with his downrightness, truculence and "caring" Toryism. The terrible fate which hangs over Jane’s head – a prospect of governessing and social patronage – also haunted my dreams, incidentally. The parting of Mr. Weston of Randalls (married to ex-governess-to-Emma ex-Miss-Taylor) and the son of his first marriage to a richer family does reflect the way in which brother Edward himself, “given away” to the Knights of Godmersham, introduced us as well as himself to the attitudes of country house culture and the ways and means and responsibilities of great estates.

My partisan attitude to Edward perhaps led me to savage those merely rich through trade, like Mrs Elton, and even the blameless and deferential Coles. But the novel also ironises an extremely deferential or romantic attitude to the Olde England of ancient estates – (Donwell Abbey par excellence): Emma’s postures and musings here are ironically rebuked by Knightley himself (he sees himself mainly as a “large” farmer and parish guardian). Perhaps in the end the ironising of Emma's conservative mythmaking makes the plot of the book something of a learning experience for "the author herself". For criticism, try the Cambridge Companion, with its chapters on class and money, part-chapter on Emma, and many suggestions for further reading. You might like to try earlier work by Marvin Mudrick, a convinced Emma-hater, to give added zing to your critique (I've lots of time – an eternity – in which to peruse the critics myself, you see!

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.