Extracts from Sensibilities
December 2006

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, five years and eight months after Captain James Cook and the crew of His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour had sighted the coast of what Cook called ‘New South Wales’.

On 26 January 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Sydney Cove and took possession in the name of King George III. Jane Austen was then thirteen years, one month and ten days old. By the time that she died, on 17 July 1817 in a house at College Street, Winchester, the colony of New South Wales had survived its first difficult years. The barrier to more extensive settlement formed by the Blue Mountains had been crossed four years earlier, and settlers were spreading across the Western Plains. British rule in New South Wales was securely established.

Heroes are those who risk everything to save others. They may sacrifice their lives performing feats of physical daring to rescue someone from bodily harm, or in adhering to a religious or political conviction that has large-scale social consequences. In literary tradition, epic heroes are demigods whose strength, courage, and of course, good looks, may awe us, but we do not picture them pulling up to our table for dinner and cards. Real heroes are flawed people who rise to greatness, and remind us of our potential to do the same. My students generally apply the same definition to female as to male heroes, but some believe the nature or perception of their deeds varies. One young woman argued that, ‘Men are admired for heroics that involve brute strength or compulsive acts. Most women who are referred to as heroes have achieved something intellectually or over time, but not one act of compulsive greatness.’ In his essay, ‘Jane Austen and Heroism,’ Irvin Ehrenpreis asserts that Austen was influenced by two kinds of literature of her era – texts that celebrated the ‘ideal of lowly Christian heroism, opposed to the semi-pagan ideal of physical courage and chivalric honor’, and those that romanticised ‘the tragic corruption of the pagan ideal’ (43). He claims that her ‘aim was to domesticate the idea of a Christian hero’, but acknowledges little heroism in the female characters beyond the stereotyped ‘quiet, heroic endurance of Fanny Price, Elinor Dashwood, and Anne Elliot’ (43).

Austen’s heroes are ‘Wonder Women’ who, over time, convey extra-ordinary qualities that manifest their creative transcendence of personal and circumstantial limitations. Their valiance is so evocative that they ultimately become secondary to the concept of female heroism which their actions evoke...

There is a witticism among novelists that there are only two types of story lines, once you have reduced literature to its essentials. Plot type number one is ‘a person goes on a journey’ – one might take The Odyssey as an early example of that type. The other is ‘a stranger comes to town’ – or a whole bunch of strangers, if you take The Iliad as your model. Either way, one is guaranteed conflict, the essence of a good plot. This dichotomy is overly simple, but on the whole, Jane Austen’s novel, Emma, easily fits into the ‘strangers come to town’ structure. Frank Churchill, above all, provides the disruption that allows the residents of Highbury eventually to rearrange themselves in a more satisfactory manner by the end. One could also see Mr Elton, who has been in the village for only a year, as another relative stranger who contributes to the problems that make the novel interesting, and certainly Augusta Hawkins descends on Highbury like a minor whirlwind. Jane Fairfax is technically an insider, but she has been away so much that she can also function as a visitor. In any case, the novel of Emma gives us, first, an inside view of the community itself and then, a picture of how of these not-fully-understood outsiders, fit in – or do not fit in. The films, however, do not work the same way. The viewer cannot reach insider-status the way that a novel-reader can; he or she must be the stranger who comes to town.