ABSTRACT
Some literary works are more amenable to and accessible through the autobiographical approach than others. We think of The Mill and the Floss, in which Eliot fictionalizes in the life and death of Tom and Maggie her very agonizing relationship with her brother, Isaac; and we think of The Prelude, the showcase of English Romanticism, in which Wordsworth uses autobiographical data, modified and chronologically rearranged to suit the exigencies of his landmark personal epic, as he presents a hero easily recognizable as Wordsworth. Similarly Jane Austen, in at least one novel, creates a heroine so like her, that Marvin Mudrick, widely regarded as one of Austen’s most discerning critics, is compelled to assert that the most meaningful approach to Pride and Prejudice is through an identification of Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Austen:
Elizabeth shares her author’s characteristic response to comic irony, defining incongruities without drawing them into a moral context; and still more specifically, Elizabeth’s vision of the world as divided between the simple and intricate is, in Pride and Prejudice at any rate, Jane Austen’s vision also. This identification between the author and her heroine establishes in fact the whole ground pattern of judgment in the novel. 1
