How Does Jane Austen Use Of Children

Scholarship concerning Jane Austen’s views and use of children within her novels has not received as much attention as other aspects of her writing in spite of the intense interest in all other aspects of her life and writing over the last two centuries. It was long assumed that, since she never married, she did not like children and that what she wrote about them shows children in a negative light. Scholarly investigations of her letters and family documentation concerning her life and times describing her views on children have somewhat countered that view, but still leave room for interpretation. Additional scholarship on her writing primarily focuses on children in specific novels and their function those novels. It is only recently
That interpretation is misleading as the presence of children in various situations or relationships provides key information to understanding what is happening in the narrative, set a particular tone in a key scene, or provide a focal point for a significant turn in the narrative. Her own great-niece, Mary August Austen-Leigh writes in
Rather, his view looks at the overall novel and the number of instances where a child plays a role and not the significance of a particular child or a particular incident involving a child in that narrative. In an opposing view, Birgitta Berglund argues that “although children may to a casual reader seem absent from the novels, or unimportant, they play necessary roles in the plot structure, and are implicated in the thematic concerns of all Austen’s novels.” In fact, as she states in a separate article “…one way in which [children] are particularly interesting and important is within an economic framework, as heirs of estates.” Juliet McMaster asserts that “[c]hildren hold a special place in her fiction, as mediators and peacemakers, as characters in their own right, and as moral