Topic 6 (session A) - Style and Style variation > Authorial and text style > Task A > Jane Austen passage

Authorial and Text Style

Task A - Initial impressions: Jane Austen passage

For us, the style of this character description is very different from the Steinbeck one. It is much more complex, rhetorical and dynamic. It is not photographic, because a lot of the information we receive is about the attitudes of people to one another. This information is not external, but social and, to some degree, psychological. These people are not described externally in a moment, but characterised in terms of their changing social attitudes to one another over an evening. The descriptions of the people are also portrayed in a value-laden and heavily ironic style. Jane Austen leaves us in no doubt as to the attitudes we, as readers, are meant to have towards the characters described.

Our rough characterisation of the style of this passage using the style scales we asked you to consider would be:

We can see that we get a very different kind of text here compared with the Steinbeck one. Not much evidence of poetic features here either, but this passage is considerably more biased, complex and rhetorical. The only reason we have not award 7s for the last two scales is that we can think of a number of writers who are even more complex and rhetorical. We gave a slightly lower score on the Internal - External scale because there is some external description of the characters and what they do. Although these judgements are rough and instinctive, note how applying the same detailed style scales to different writers helps to begin to explain the character of their writing.

There are a number of different characters in this passage, some of whom are not named. This is one of the ways in which Jane Austen's description is more complex than the Steinbeck one (more complex doesn't mean better, of course, just different). For the main character, Mr Darcy, we have conflicting impressions, which is connected to the complexity of the writing. He is handsome and rich, which is prototypical for the male hero in romance fiction. But he also has an apparently unpleasant character, which goes against our prototypical hero assumptions. However, things are even more complicated than that: our view of him as unpleasant appears to be based on the perceptions of the unnamed characters, through whose eyes we see him. And it is not clear that we can trust those judgements - the other people at the gathering appear to like him initially because he is handsome and rich, rather than because of his intrinsic qualities. So we may not be able to trust their later, negative, judgements either. These misgivings are strengthened by the rhetorical, ironising style that the writing has. If you know the whole novel, you will know that Mr Darcy's apparent haughtiness is eventually explained through his attempts to act morally and properly at all times, and of course the right-thinking heroine of the novel, Elizabeth Bennett, is the first to appreciate him for what he really is, and ends up marrying him. But the irony we have already noticed (and which we will need to analyse further) suggests that this novel is not just a romance where the heroine gets her man. It combines romance, and a happy ending, with biting social critique.

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