The Essential Jane Austen

New York Times

4 days ago

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?
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