Date of Publication :15th October 2020

Abstract: Austen’s novels were written and published by her when the Romantic movement in literature had begun to emerge. Though Austen and Wordsworth were contemporaries, Austen is called an ‘Augustan novelist’ and Wordsworth is called a ‘Romantic poet’. Austen’s novels are usually treated as the part of the 18th century tradition of reason and good sense, which the Romantic movement reacted against. She often ridicules the lack of realism, falsities of sentiment and absence of psychological veracity in the treatment of character in the novels of sensibility and particularly in the Gothic novels, very popular in her time. She consciously and deliberately identified herself with the 18th century tradition of realism initiated by Richardson and Fielding, who dealt with the problematic nature of the relation between the individual and society, and tried to resolve the problem through a plot where the rights of the individual are somehow balanced by his or her obligations to society. However, there are critics, who regard Austen as a transitional novelist. M. Mukherjee finds her instrumental in the extension of the self to include woman in novels, which has been uptill now all male-dominated. R. Vanita, too sees Austen as a Romantic novelist because of her interest in the juxtaposition of inner and outer worlds, the movement of the individual consciousness between these worlds and the insistence in the novels on love and friendship as the best basis for human community.

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