Unveiling Jane Austen

Welcome to Unveiling Jane!

Unveiling Jane Austen is a writing series about Austen's six novels, her early teenage writings, her unfinished works, her letters and her life. These posts are an extension of my creative and academic writing on Jane Austen, Regency Era and other women writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

I am interested in unveiling every side of Jane. My own unveiling of Jane began at the tender age of thirteen and it still continues…what’s explicit and what’s implicit in Jane’s writing? From good to ugly, from mysterious to outrageous, from delicate to bold, from weak to courageous… Let’s unveil together, the delicate veils of Austen’s writings and our understanding and perception of her as an author.

The month of June is dedicated towards discussing the "Silent Warriors of Austen". Austen's resilient and stoic women Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Elinor Dashwood, Jane Fairfax, Eleanor Tilney and Jane Bennet. This month I will be sharing my thoughts on how Austen cultivates strength in her quiet characters and powerfully depicts their emotional suffering through tropes of passing time and waiting.

I am specifically interested in exploring how Austen manifests emotional suffering as physical withering as it is acutely depicted in Anne Elliot’s appearance after her separation from Captain Wentworth at the age of nineteen. The same is the case with Jane Fairfax as she quietly bares the pains of her uncertain circumstances and lives under the burden of her secret engagement and attachment to Frank Churchill.

My creative and personal exploration of Austen is anchored in her relevance for today, our contemporary culture, it aims to dig deep, to explore the intersections between the lived experiences of individuals from the past and individuals of the present time.

The reason I specifically say, “lived experiences of individuals”, and not just lived experiences of women, because I believe that Austen not only wrote for women of her time but also wrote specifically for men, to depict their hardships and emotional struggles and like women, they also suffered and were suppressed under patriarchal structures and economical structures of their day. All of this is related to our times, our contemporary cultures and regardless of our gender identities (gender-orientation), our culture and race, the characters in Austen’s novel whether women or men and sometimes maybe of hidden (veiled) gender identities still act as examples or prototypes to our current emotional and financial situations and that is the reason why Jane Austen remains so pervasive and relevant in our society today.

As I speak of emotional suffering, it must give you some clues that my discussion is very often going to touch upon topics of mental health in Jane Austen, how she depicts the “silence” of her characters. As my series will begin by discussing heroines whose personalities are quiet and stoic, let me make one point here, that I don’t think that Austen condones or supports silence in the face of suffering. However, she depicts characters who are so severely trapped in their circumstances with no real resources of help and support around them, that they have to go through those circumstances and then she conveys the resilience and strength and ultimately power of these individuals gained through that process of struggle. Austen very much off-sets those "silences" in her other novels through her other out-spoken characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Marianne Dashwood and Catherine Moorland.

Please stay tuned for more this week and the rest of June. The first two weeks of July will be dedicated to the memoriam and celebration of Austen's life as her 206th death anniversary approaches fast on 18th July, 2023. I will attempt to devote time towards her letters, the relationship with her sister Cassandra, her home in Chawton, Hampshire, and the other places she lived in and travelled during her life.

See you later this week with more. In the meantime, read, share, follow and subscribe!

Keep Unveiling!

T.K. Urooj