20 Dec 2010 01:36:40
Google's home page is festooned today with a doodle to celebrate the 235th birthday of novelist Jane Austen. A Regency couple – most likely the novelist's most celebrated characters, Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice – are pictured taking a stroll through the English countryside, eyeing each other rather coyly, in the illustration on the search engine's site.
Google makes a habit of marking literary anniversaries, among others, and has already featured Robert Louis Stevenson's 160th (13 November) and Agatha Christie's 120th (15 September) this autumn.
Austen is another writer who hardly needs further publicity, with novels – including Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park – that remain widely read, and so frequently adapted on film and TV that they have almost become a costume drama cliché.
Often represented as a "romantic" writer, Austen's books in fact contain much comic but biting social satire, and reflections on the chances and choices of women whose options in life are severely limited. Accusations by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland earlier this autumn that her famously crisp prose style owed as much to her editor William Gifford as to her own talents have been rebuffed by other Janeites, leaving her reputation as the queen of elegant prose unsullied.
The author herself was born in 1775, one of eight children born to a clergyman, growing up in a close-knit family. She began to write as a teenager and, despite attachments, never married, living instead with her mother and sister Cassandra.
Austen's first book, Sense and Sensibility, about two sisters with contrasting temperaments, appeared in 1811. It was published anonymously, with Austen's brother Henry helping her negotiate with the publisher.
Google makes a habit of marking literary anniversaries, among others, and has already featured Robert Louis Stevenson's 160th (13 November) and Agatha Christie's 120th (15 September) this autumn.
Austen is another writer who hardly needs further publicity, with novels – including Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park – that remain widely read, and so frequently adapted on film and TV that they have almost become a costume drama cliché.
Often represented as a "romantic" writer, Austen's books in fact contain much comic but biting social satire, and reflections on the chances and choices of women whose options in life are severely limited. Accusations by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland earlier this autumn that her famously crisp prose style owed as much to her editor William Gifford as to her own talents have been rebuffed by other Janeites, leaving her reputation as the queen of elegant prose unsullied.
The author herself was born in 1775, one of eight children born to a clergyman, growing up in a close-knit family. She began to write as a teenager and, despite attachments, never married, living instead with her mother and sister Cassandra.
Austen's first book, Sense and Sensibility, about two sisters with contrasting temperaments, appeared in 1811. It was published anonymously, with Austen's brother Henry helping her negotiate with the publisher.
