Who was Jane Austen and why do people still read her?

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in the village of Steventon in Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman. She never married, never left England, never had a significant public career during her lifetime, and published all of her novels anonymously. She died at forty-one. The six novels she completed are among the most consistently read works in the English language, two centuries after her death.

The question of why people still read her has a shorter answer than it might appear: because no one has matched her since at the specific things she does.

What was her life actually like?#

Austen's life was quiet by the standards of the fiction she wrote about and by the standards of any era. She grew up in Steventon, spent several years in Bath (which she disliked), and eventually settled at Chawton in Hampshire with her mother, her sister Cassandra, and a friend. She never owned a house. She had no private writing room. She wrote on small pieces of paper that she could hide under blotting paper when someone came into the room, working at a table in the family living area.

The romantic biography that gets attached to her -- the thwarted love affair, the passionate private life -- is largely constructed from very little evidence. Her sister Cassandra burned a significant portion of her letters after her death, which has left scholars to reconstruct what they can. What is clear is that she declined at least one marriage proposal (from a Hampshire neighbour named Harris Bigg-Wither, whom she accepted one evening and rejected the next morning), and that she appears to have had a romantic attachment to a man who died before anything could develop.

She was a sharp observer of the world she lived in -- small-scale, county society, the concerns of middle-class families with limited incomes and marriage-dependent futures -- and she wrote about it with extraordinary precision.

What were her novels actually about?#

The surface subject of all six major Austen novels is marriage. The deep subject is how intelligent women navigate a social system that restricts them economically and socially to a narrow set of choices, while maintaining moral integrity and self-respect.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the most beloved. Elizabeth Bennet's verbal sparring with Fitzwilliam Darcy is the most famous romance in English fiction, but the novel's actual argument is about the relationship between individual judgment and social pressure. Elizabeth must be right about Darcy in a context where everything encourages her to be wrong, and right about Wickham in a context where everything encourages her to be taken in.

Emma (1815) is about a woman who is wrong about almost everything and has to learn to see clearly. Many critics consider it the finest of the six. Austen reportedly told her family she was writing "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." She was wrong about that.

Persuasion (1817), published posthumously, is the most autumnal and the most emotionally direct. Anne Elliot is a woman who made the safe choice eight years ago and is living with the weight of it. The novel is Austen's most mature work and frequently the favourite of readers who come to her later in life.

Why do people still read her?#

Austen's prose is precise in a way that very few writers achieve. She uses free indirect discourse -- a technique in which the narrator's voice and the character's voice merge, so the reader gets ironic distance and intimate access simultaneously -- with a control that Jane Austen scholars have spent decades trying to fully describe.

Her comedy is still funny, which is not something that can be said of most 200-year-old writing. Her moral analysis is still useful. The social pressures she describes -- the pressure to perform, to marry well, to manage appearances, to maintain respectability at the cost of honesty -- have not vanished.

And she remains readable at a pace that most 19th-century novelists do not. Her sentences are long but not Dickensian. Her plots are dense but not Wilkie Collins dense. She is the easiest entry point into the 19th-century novel.

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Further reading#

For the full list of Austen's novels and which to read first, the best Jane Austen novels ranked covers the ordering question.

For what to read after Pride and Prejudice, the full recommendation list covers every direction.

All of Austen's major novels are free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, Knopf, 1997
• John Mullan, What Matters in Jane Austen?, Bloomsbury, 2012
• Kathryn Sutherland, ed., Jane Austen's Textual Lives, Oxford University Press, 2005