The great British writer Jane Austen, whose 250th birthday is being celebrated this year, wrote only six complete novels and died without seeing her own extraordinary success. But few authors have had as felicitous, or as enduring, an afterlife as the inimitable Miss Austen. Her books, exquisite comedies of manners and morals set among the landed gentry in 18th- and 19th-century England, are snapshots of their time, but timeless in their appeal.
Austen’s literary preoccupations — romance, class, morality, money — might seem light, even frivolous. But they carry universal truths, and not just the ironic one in the bravura opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” about single men, fortunes and wives. With high wit and delectable plotting, the books skewer self-regard, hypocrisy and snobbery; lay bare unpleasant truths about the precarious position of women in Regency England and the dark origins of rich families’ fortunes; and exhibit a strikingly modern writing technique.
Using free indirect style, also known as free indirect discourse, Austen allows her omniscient narrators to inhabit the thoughts of different characters in turn, in ways that reflect their idiosyncratic quirks of thinking and speaking — maintaining the detachment of the third person while reflecting the biases of someone speaking in the first person. While Austen wasn’t the first to employ what is now a thoroughly familiar approach, she refined and popularized it.
Austen’s life itself was perhaps most remarkable for its unremarkability. (We know less than we should; many of her letters were destroyed after her death — some by her sister, Cassandra, and others, years later, by her niece Fanny.) But we know that she was born in Steventon, Hampshire, in 1775, the seventh of eight children, to the Rev. George and Cassandra Austen, and that she was educated mostly at home, her lessons supplemented by her father’s unusually extensive library. After uprooting the family to Bath — a place Jane hated — her father died in 1805, leaving Jane, her mother and her sister financially dependent on their male relatives.
In 1809, the three settled in a modest cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Jane wrote on a small writing table in the dining room (you can see it there still; the house is now a museum). Her first four books — “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814) and “Emma” (1815) — were published in quick succession toward the end of her life, and without her name on them. (The author was identified only as “A Lady.”) She died in 1817, at the age of 41; her final two novels, “Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey,” were published posthumously. She also left behind “Lady Susan,” an epistolary novella, and two unfinished novels, “Sanditon” and “The Watsons.”
Every reader brings her own sensibility to Austen’s novels. You can read them for their intricately arranged marriage plots, for their sly humor, for what they say about women and the financial arrangements that underpinned their search for husbands, for their vivid representation of a particular stratum of English life at a particular time. To my mind, there’s no one like her for using comic observation to alleviate the sting or tiresomeness of a vexing situation. It helps to imagine: How would Jane have described this?
Though marriage is the ultimate happy ending in Austen’s fiction, she herself never married. But there is some evidence that she might actually have preferred being single, despite having at least one serious flirtation, with a man named Tom Lefroy, and receiving a proposal of marriage from another man, Harris Bigg-Wither. (She accepted but broke off the engagement the next day.)
An 1814 letter to a niece who had asked for romantic advice provides some insight into how she felt about the matter.
Do not “think of accepting him unless you really do like him,” she wrote. “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”
I want to read the best one first
Ha! Good luck finding a definitive consensus on an unresolvable issue. Each of the six novels has its particular aficionados, so let’s approach the question from another angle.
Surely the gateway drug to Austen is “Pride and Prejudice,” the most crowd-pleasing of the novels, with its indelible portrait of the Bennet family — the five unmarried daughters, the social-climbing mother, the good-hearted but emotionally lazy father — and its confection of a plot. At heart, the book is about whether the daughters, or at least the two eldest ones, can find husbands.
The focal point, of course, is the rocky courtship between the spirited and delightful Elizabeth Bennet, known as Lizzie, and the brooding and snobbish Fitzwilliam Darcy, known as Mr. Darcy. Impediments to their happiness include her embarrassingly crass family, his imperiously arrogant temperament and a massive disparity in fortune (she’s poor; he’s rich).
Published during Jane’s lifetime, the book earned an initial payment of 110 pounds, got admiring reviews — the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan is said to have pronounced it one of the cleverest things he’d ever read — and brought true pleasure to its author, even though no one but her immediate circle knew her identity as Lizzie’s creator.
“I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print,” Jane wrote to her sister.
I adore a story about sisters
Elinor Dashwood, all practicality and propriety; Marianne Dashwood, all emotion and unfettered honesty — these are the main characters in “Sense and Sensibility,” a tale of two radically different approaches to love and life.
The book begins with the death of the Dashwood sisters’ father and their eviction from home by their half brother and his grasping wife (Austen is very good at conveying the brutal effects of primogeniture on women). Repairing with their mother and a younger sister to a tiny country cottage that befits their cruelly reduced circumstances, they both become entangled with men of their acquaintance: Elinor with Edward Ferrers, her sister-in-law’s kind and thoughtful brother, and Marianne with Mr. Willoughby, a Byronic hero who turns out to be a cad.
It’s not entirely clear whose point of view Austen leans toward at the end. While it seems on first reading that Elinor’s approach — of decorum, moderation and reserve — is closer to Austen’s than Marianne’s extreme romanticism, some critics disagree.
“One of the things that gives the book its intense interest is that Austen starts as though she is favoring one set of answers, and grows less certain as the book progresses,” writes Claire Tomalin in her 1997 biography “Jane Austen: A Life.”
I want a novel with a more realistic view of love
The more realistic joys of “Persuasion” (1817) — a book about second chances, the passage of time and the constancy of love — make it many readers’ favorite Austen novel. It’s the only one whose heroine is no longer in the first bloom of youth.
Of course Anne Elliot, the supposedly elderly spinster at its center, is just 27 years old. But never mind that! Those were different times. As the book begins, the chronically unmarried Anne has settled into a quiet life of duty and service to relatives like her vain and shallow father and her hopelessly incompetent sister. But she lives with deep regret over her rejection, eight years earlier, of the love of her life, Frederick Wentworth.
In the intervening years, he’s become a successful naval captain, and when he returns to their neighborhood — still handsome, newly rich and full of bitterness about their thwarted love affair — it breaks her heart all over again. “She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him,” he thinks. “Her power with him was gone forever.”
The road back to their renewed love is full of exciting plot twists, including other flirtations (his), other suitors (hers) and a dramatic seaside accident. Anne’s relatives get a satisfying comeuppance of sorts in the end. And Captain Wentworth’s declaration of love — “you pierce my soul,” he writes in a truly excellent letter, “I am half agony, half hope” — is Austen at her swooniest.
A short but significant exchange near the end of “Persuasion” provides a valuable window into the author’s views about writing as a woman at a time when such a thing was rare. Anne and a male acquaintance have been debating whether men or women feel love more powerfully or more constantly. Men, the friend declares — every book says so.
It’s not fair to use that example, Anne responds, when so few books are written by women.
“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” she says. “The pen has been in their hands.”
I’m up for a challenge
“Mansfield Park” might be the hardest of Austen’s novels to love. Its heroine, Fanny Price, is not lively, confident, rich, charming or witty; Fanny’s ultimate love interest, her cousin Edmund, is worthy rather than fun. The book touches on adultery, divorce, alcoholism and — unique among Austen’s work — makes explicit references to the slave trade that, in this book, forms the basis for the fortune of Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram.
After a neglectful childhood, Fanny is sent to live in Sir Thomas’s house. Raised among her cousins, she’s always treated as an inferior. But when a suitor with a reputation for toying with ladies’ affections proposes to marry her — a marriage promoted by her uncle as a way for her to better herself — she refuses on the grounds that she doesn’t respect him.
The book concludes with a hasty happy ending. Fanny ends up with Edmund. Her uncle sees her worth. Edmund’s scandalous sister — who abandoned her husband for Fanny’s erstwhile suitor and was left by him in turn — has been ignominiously banished to a quiet life of disgrace with an annoying relative.
But still. “The conclusion rings in simultaneous and contradictory voices,” Lauren Groff wrote in an introduction to a new edition of the novel. “Fanny gets what she wants, and the ending is the happy one that Austen’s readers have come to expect; yet in a separate and darker and deeper voice, ‘Mansfield Park’ sings itself a tragedy.”
Give me her most charming and funny novel
“Emma” has some of the best characters and most delicious set pieces in all of Austen’s work, starting with the maddeningly highhanded but ultimately winning titular character, Emma Woodhouse. For starters, there’s Mr. Elton, the ridiculously puffed-up local vicar, whom Emma ill-advisedly tries to set up with her friend Harriet but who believes he is courting Emma herself.
There’s the operatically vulgar woman whom Mr. Elton hastily marries after Emma rejects him, and Emma’s hypochondriac of a father, who always worries about catching a chill and feels pity for anyone forced to leave the house. The picnic scene, where a highly spirited Emma carelessly mocks an older woman of her acquaintance; Emma’s penitent visit to try to make amends; the tangled web woven around two secondary characters with a shared secret — the book brings one delight after another.
Emma is hard to admire unreservedly — she’s so spoiled! — but she’s also smart, independent-minded and lively, and willing to apologize for her failings and learn from her mistakes. She’s redeemed by so many things, but most of all by her tenderness toward and devotion for her neurotic father. She can’t marry her true love, Mr. Knightley, unless he agrees to quit his house and come live in the one she and her father share — and luckily, he does.
I’d like something spooky
A sendup of Gothic novels and a bit of a Gothic novel itself, “Northanger Abbey” (1817) may not be the most sophisticated of Austen’s books — it was the first one she wrote, though she revised it throughout her life — but it’s full of youthful energy and high spirits. It has a lovable, unworldly heroine, Catherine Morland; several villainous figures, including the scandalously coquettish Isabella Thorpe and her uncouth buffoon of a brother, John; and a forbidding old abbey that may or may not harbor murderous secrets.
It’s also a love letter to fiction, threaded with a droll self-consciousness about literary convention from the opening line: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.”
At several points, Austen speaks directly to the reader, defending novels from contemporary critics who dismissed the genre as frivolous and not worthy of serious attention.
“Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world,” she writes, “no species of composition has been so much decried.”
I’ve read everything Austen wrote. Now what?
Jane Austen hasn’t written anything in more than 200 years, but her novels are still being reimagined and recast onstage, onscreen and on the page. So far they’ve been presented as fantasy mash-ups, Bollywood extravaganzas and saucy rom-coms. They’ve been transported to (among other places) Delhi, Fire Island, California, the London publishing world of the 1990s and early ’00s, and a parallel version of 19th-century England in which zombies roam.
One fine place to begin is with Curtis Sittenfeld’s effervescent “Eligible” (2016), which transports “Pride and Prejudice” to that gossipy center of social maneuvering: the early-21st-century Cincinnati suburbs. Here Lizzie has become Liz, a magazine writer in her 30s embroiled in an unsatisfying situationship with the treacherous Jasper Wick (an updated Mr. Wickham). Mr. Bingley is now a doofy but eager-to-please emergency-room doctor named Chip; and Mr. Darcy — known as Darcy because Fitzwilliam, his first name, is such a mouthful — is a supercilious neurosurgeon who thinks he’s too good for Liz (and for the Midwest in general).
Other notable adaptations include P.D. James’s “Death Comes to Pemberley” (2011), in which Captain Denny, a minor “Pride and Prejudice” character, is killed on the Darcys’ estate — and Mr. Wickham is charged with his murder. Joan Aiken’s “Jane Fairfax” (1990) offers a retelling of “Emma” from the perspective of one of its pivotal characters. Meanwhile, Gill Hornby’s beguiling “Miss Austen” (2020) is a fictionalized version of Jane’s close relationship with her sister that revisits past romances in their lives and provides an intriguing explanation of Cassandra’s real-life decision to burn many of Jane’s letters.
As for movie and TV adaptations, there’s something to suit nearly every taste, ranging from the strictly faithful to the wildly off-piste. (Who’s your favorite Mr. Darcy from the endless parade to stride manfully across the screen? Discuss!)
Perhaps the most sublime of all the adaptations, in its particular way, is the 1995 Amy Heckerling hit “Clueless,” which somehow manages to be true to “Emma,” its source material, despite being boldly set among spoiled teenagers in Beverly Hills in the 1990s.
Where can I learn more about Jane the person?
The relative paucity of information about Austen’s life hasn’t stopped a steady stream of biographers, critics and academics from producing endless books about her and her writing. Perhaps the definitive biography is Tomalin’s masterly “Jane Austen: A Life,” which uses letters, contemporaneous accounts and works of scholarship to present a rich portrait not just of Jane and her family, but also of the era in which they lived.
There are other interesting modern perspectives. John Mullan’s “What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved” (2012) breaks down the books into a set of themes posed as questions like: “How Much Money Is Enough?” It makes you “appreciate the sheer density, the tight-woven intricacy, of every scene and every exchange,” Tessa Hadley wrote in The Guardian.
William Deresiewicz’s 2005 book, “Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets,” describes the different phases of Austen’s writing career; its 2011 follow-up, “A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter,” tells how his early animosity for her work turned to a sincere admiration.
For a deep immersion into the arch, gossipy and very astute words of the author herself, the fourth edition of “Jane Austen’s Letters” (2011), edited by Deirdre Le Faye, anthologizes all of the novelist’s existing letters (that we know about), in chronological order, along with annotations and scholarly insights.
For those wanting a contrarian perspective, Helena Kelly’s “Jane Austen: The Secret Radical” (2017) “sweeps the board clear of all previous critical commentary,” John Sutherland wrote in his review for The Times (he was not a fan).
Not that there is nothing left to say, or a shortage of people to say it. Two major Jane Austen groups — the Jane Austen Society in Britain, and the Jane Austen Society of North America in the United States — are still going strong, and producing new papers, new perspectives and new scholarship all the time.