The Function and Importance of Letters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

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The function and importance of letters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The epistolary mode of writing novels, which was very popular in the 18th Century, may have influenced Jane Austen’s decision to include over twenty letters in her novel Pride and Prejudice. Writers will use letters in their novels for a variety of reasons. Letters can reasonably contain a lot of information, sometimes narrating a crisis, and so help to move the plot along. They can include secrets and desires that perhaps would not be spoken aloud, or contain important information privy only to a few characters. If the letter is copied in the text, the date on the letter provides a marker of time. Letters can also act as a dramatic device, mounting and releasing tension, or simply add to the variety of voices in the novel. There is evidence to suggest however that Ms. Austen primarily used letters to reveal the character of the letter writer, and to a lesser extent, the character of the letter’s recipient. With regard to the letters written by male characters, Jackie F. Mijares, in his essay “The Masculine Pen: Character and Correspondence in Pride and Prejudice” (2005), further argues, “As a feminine narrative voice, Austen will never listen in to conversations between men, or read men’s solitary thoughts. She will only write from the perspective of what a lady can hear, observe, or do. However, though Austen normally conveys her male characters’ thoughts via their actions and conversations in public with female characters, one way she gets around her own rule is with the masculine pen”. Jane Austen would certainly have been aware of letter-writing etiquette and demonstrates such during Jane and Elizabeth’s stay at Netherfield when Jane was unwell. During the first evening of her stay Elizabeth listens with amusement to the “perpetual commendations of the lady [Miss Bingley] either
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