JANE AUSTEN, CRITICISM AGAINST THE 'LANDED GENTRY'

Today, The Morgans & The Grandma have visited Steventon in Hampshire to meet Jane Austen, one of the most popular English writers of all time whose works are a critic about the landed gentry.

 

Before the visit, the family has worked some English grammar with Have to/Don't have to and Shall.

More information: Have to

More information: Shall

 

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 -18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.

Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism, humour, and social commentary, have long earned her acclaim among critics, scholars, and popular audiences alike.

With the publications of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, a short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and another unfinished novel, The Watsons. Her six full-length novels have rarely been out of print, although they were published anonymously and brought her moderate success and little fame during her lifetime.

A significant transition in her posthumous reputation occurred in 1833, when her novels were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series, illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering, and sold as a set. They gradually gained wider acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience.

 

More information: Jane Austen 

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775. She was born a month later than her parents expected; her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago. He added that her arrival was particularly welcome as "a future companion to her sister". The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.

In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them with her to Southampton when she moved there later in the year. In the autumn both girls were sent home when they caught typhus and Austen nearly died.

Austen was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school in Reading with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls' School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle, who possessed a cork leg and a passion for theatre. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family. After 1786, Austen never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment.

From the age of eleven, and perhaps earlier, Austen wrote poems and stories for her own and her family's amusement.

 

After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family before 1796 and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.

 

More information: Jane Austen 

Austen began a second novel, First Impressions, later published as Pride and Prejudice, in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an established favourite. At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it Declined by Return of Post.

Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility.

In 1797, Austen met her cousin, and future sister-in-law, Eliza de Feuillide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.

 

During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan, later Northanger Abbey, a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being in the press, but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.

 

More information: Literariness 

In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started but did not complete her novel, The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. 

Sutherland describes the novel as a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives. Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.

Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration.  She continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817 Austen began The Brothers, titled Sanditon when published in 1925, and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness.

Austen made light of her condition, describing it as bile and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death.

Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the extraordinary endowments of her mind, but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.

 

 More information: Jane Austin's House

 

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible. 

Jane Austen

NÚRIA WINSOR & DAVID BOWIE'S MARS SPACE ODDITY

Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have visited The Hampstead Scientific Society (HSS). 

They have had a wonderful partner, David Bowie, the Starman, who has driven to Mars in Space Oddity with Núria Winsor to discover the red planet during a day-trip.

Before this visit, the family has studied some English grammar with the modal verb Have to/Don't have to and they have started to read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

More information: Have to/Don't have to 

More information: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe's Creator In Prision

The Hampstead Scientific Society (HSS) in north London was founded in July 1899 as the Hampstead Astronomical and General Scientific Society by P.E. Vizard. It aims to be inclusive, promoting and nurturing an interest in all branches of science, while catering for wide levels of knowledge, from layman to expert alike. The society maintains specialist astronomy and meteorology sections and runs a programme of lectures on various scientific topics in the Hampstead area of North West London.

The HSS is a registered charity which is affiliated with the British Science Association and the Richmond Scientific Society.

More information: Hampstead Scientific Society

David Robert Jones (8 January 1947-10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie was an English singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. 

He is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.

Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, and his music and stagecraft had a significant impact on popular music.

David Robert Jones was born on 8 January 1947 in Brixton, London.

Bowie developed an interest in music from an early age. He studied art, music and design before embarking on a professional career as a musician in 1963. He released a string of unsuccessful singles with local bands and a solo album before achieving his first top-five entry on the UK Singles Chart with Space Oddity (1969).

After a period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant and androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The character was spearheaded by the success of Starman and album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which won him widespread popularity.

In 1975, Bowie's style shifted towards a sound he characterised as plastic soul, initially alienating many of his UK fans but garnering his first major US crossover success with the number-one single Fame and the album Young Americans.

In 1976, Bowie starred in the cult film The Man Who Fell to Earth and released Station to Station. 

In 1977, he again changed direction with the electronic-inflected album Low, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno that came to be known as the Berlin Trilogy. Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979) followed; each album reached the UK top five and received lasting critical praise.

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had three number-one hits: the 1980 single Ashes to Ashes, its album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and Under Pressure (a 1981 collaboration with Queen). He achieved his greatest commercial success in the 1980s with Let's Dance (1983).

Between 1988 and 1992, he fronted the hard rock band Tin Machine before resuming his solo career in 1993. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including industrial and jungle. He also continued acting; his roles included Major Jack Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat (1996), and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos. He stopped touring after 2004 and his last live performance was at a charity event in 2006.

He returned from a decade-long recording hiatus in 2013 with The Next Day. He died two days after both his 69th birthday and the release of his final album, Blackstar.

During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at over 100 million records worldwide, made him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Often dubbed the chameleon of rock due to his constant musical reinventions, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Rolling Stone ranked him among the greatest artists in history. 

As of 2022, Bowie was the best-selling vinyl artist of the 21st century.

Bowie died in New York City on 10 January 2016.

Bowie's songs and stagecraft brought a new dimension to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing its immediate forms and subsequent development.

Perone credited Bowie with having brought sophistication to rock music, and critical reviews frequently acknowledged the intellectual depth of his work and influence.

The BBC's arts editor Will Gompertz likened Bowie to Pablo Picasso, writing that he was an innovative, visionary, restless artist who synthesised complex avant garde concepts into beautifully coherent works that touched the hearts and minds of millions.

More information: David Bowie

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

David Bowie

THE STONES HAVE TO PREPARE THEIR CAMBRIDGE EXAM

Today, The Stones and The Grandma have talked with MJ by Google Meet. They are in Honolulu and MJ is in Sant Boi de Llobregat preparing their A2 Cambridge Exam documentation.

The family is preparing this important exam in Hawaii without interferences and surrounded by a wonderful an amazing environment that helps them to study and understand all the English grammar that they are discovering.

They have reviewed Modal Verbs (Have to/Don't have to); Countable and Uncountable (Some/Any) and they have started to prepare their own stories to pass their Cambridge speaking.

The University of Cambridge, legal name The Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cambridge, is a collegiate research university in Cambridge, England.

Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by King Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's fourth-oldest surviving university.

The university grew out of an association of scholars who left the University of Oxford after a dispute with the townspeople. The two English ancient universities share many common features and are often referred to jointly as Oxbridge.

Cambridge is formed from a variety of institutions which include 31 semi-autonomous constituent colleges and over 150 academic departments, faculties and other institutions organised into six schools.

All the colleges are self-governing institutions within the university, each controlling its own membership and with its own internal structure and activities.

More information: Have to/Don't have to

All students are members of a college. Cambridge does not have a main campus, and its colleges and central facilities are scattered throughout the city. Undergraduate teaching at Cambridge is organised around weekly small-group supervisions in the colleges –a feature unique to the Oxbridge system. These are supported by classes, lectures, seminars, laboratory work and occasionally further supervisions provided by the central university faculties and departments. Postgraduate teaching is provided predominantly centrally.

Cambridge University Press, a department of the university, is the oldest university press in the world and currently the second largest university press in the world.

Cambridge Assessment, also a department of the university, is one of the world's leading examining bodies and provides assessment to over eight million learners globally every year.

The university also operates eight cultural and scientific museums, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as a botanic garden. Cambridge's libraries, of which there are 116, hold a total of around 16 million books, around nine million of which are in Cambridge University Library, a legal deposit library.

The university is home to, but independent of, the Cambridge Union -the world's oldest debating society. The university is closely linked to the development of the high-tech business cluster known as Silicon Fen. It is the central member of Cambridge University Health Partners, an academic health science centre based around the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

Cambridge has educated many notable alumni, including eminent mathematicians, scientists, politicians, lawyers, philosophers, writers, actors, monarchs and other heads of state.

More information: Some/Any

As of October 2020, 121 Nobel laureates, 11 Fields Medalists, 7 Turing Award winners and 14 British prime ministers have been affiliated with Cambridge as students, alumni, faculty or research staff. University alumni have won 194 Olympic medals.

By the late 12th century, the Cambridge area already had a scholarly and ecclesiastical reputation, due to monks from the nearby bishopric church of Ely. However, it was an incident at Oxford which is most likely to have led to the establishment of the university: three Oxford scholars were hanged by the town authorities for the death of a woman, without consulting the ecclesiastical authorities, who would normally take precedence and pardon the scholars in such a case, but were at that time in conflict with King John.

Fearing more violence from the townsfolk, scholars from the University of Oxford started to move away to cities such as Paris, Reading, and Cambridge. Subsequently, enough scholars remained in Cambridge to form the nucleus of a new university when it had become safe enough for academia to resume at Oxford.

In order to claim precedence, it is common for Cambridge to trace its founding to the 1231 charter from King Henry III granting it the right to discipline its own members (ius non-trahi extra) and an exemption from some taxes; Oxford was not granted similar rights until 1248.

A bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach everywhere in Christendom. After Cambridge was described as a studium generale in a letter from Pope Nicholas IV in 1290, and confirmed as such in a bull by Pope John XXII in 1318, it became common for researchers from other European medieval universities to visit Cambridge to study or to give lecture courses.

More information: University of Cambridge

Cambridge is one of the best universities in the world,
especially in my field.

Stephen Hawking