Jane Austen 200

Dr Hudson

As a teacher, it’s always a great pleasure to hear from former pupils, so I was delighted to get a card at the beginning of this term from an Old Pauline now studying English at university who wrote specifically to say that he had taken my advice and read the works of Jane Austen. I remembered that he had felt put off by her reputation when we had talked on one occasion about the novels, thinking they were not for him. Now, he said, he saw why I had recommended them and was a confirmed admirer of her writing.

Jane Austen died in 1817, two hundred years ago this year, at the age of 42. Now, this relatively quiet-living, spinster from a village in Hampshire is one of the most famous authors in the English-speaking world.
Across the world a growing number worship her in almost cult-like proportions, the so-called ‘Janeites’. Her face is to be on the new ten pound notes. This, despite the fact that her literary output is slim: she anonymously published four books during her life and shortly after her death another two novels appeared in a single volume. Those six novels are the only fruit of her mature writing – beside them, we have a couple of incomplete texts and a collection of juvenilia which she never intended for publication but which a public hungry for more work by the ‘divine Jane’ nevertheless hungrily consume. It is upon those six novels, though – Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion – that her reputation depends. Let me admit, I love them; what is it that I, and clearly a large number of others, think so good about them?

Well, they are funny. It’s an acerbic wit, which hides beneath a veneer of respectability, but once her ironic tone becomes apparent, it’s difficult not to take delight in her clinical observation of human behaviour with all its attendant weakness and hypocrisy. A friend of mine, himself a novelist, suggests that reading Austen is like ‘eating whipped cream and razor blades’, and I see what he means. However, although she casts a querulous eye beneath a raised brow on how we – especially the English – conduct ourselves in relation to one another, Austen is not afraid to present joy and small acts of heroism. For every Mr Wickham, the initially plausible womaniser of Pride and Prejudice there is an Anne Elliot, standing up against the snobbery and selfishness of her father and sisters in Persuasion. Austen writes comedies – both in the sense that there are comic set pieces that, I promise, can make one laugh out loud (well, make me do so, anyway) and in the generic sense that her novels all end happily, with the marriage of the heroine to her beloved. The loose ends are mostly tied up but there is usually some short thread or other left for our imaginations to pull upon, wondering whether life is truly going to be as contented as the conclusion suggests.

It’s true that the social milieu of her novels is limited. She herself wrote that she worked on ‘a little piece of ivory, two inches wide’, in reference to the fashionable miniatures painted in her day. But among the small English settings, such as her invented Surrey town, Highbury, in Emma, there are important scenes in London or among the garish modern buildings, as they then were, of Bath – the Las Vegas of the age, where the rich and would-be famous flocked to be seen taking the waters or parading in the pump room. (Austen, it is reported, fainted when her father announced that he would be retiring as the vicar of their Hampshire town and the family moving to Bath.) But even though she did not write anything as ambitious in scope as Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dickens’s Bleak House – books that cover more ground in terms respectively of public events and varying social strata – what she has to tell us about how people think and act is no less significant or identifiable than any state of the nation tract or polemic.

And this is perhaps the most admirable thing about Austen for me: her facility to move seamlessly in and out of the consciousness of her characters in a style that she more or less invented – now referred to as ‘free indirect discourse’. This style permits the reader to comprehend different points of view as we read, without jarring or disturbing the narrative. It’s only when we begin to study the text in detail that we see how immensely accomplished Austen’s writing is: apparently effortless but brilliantly illustrating the tricks and flaps of the human mind, as well as providing an ironic commentary on human foibles. Psychologically convincing and funny. And only six to collect the set; who could ask for more?

Well, once you’re hooked, yes, the most disappointing thing about Austen is that there isn’t more. I can see why people turn to the juvenilia: her comic novel, Lady Susan, written when she was eighteen or nineteen, was recently turned into the film Love and Friendship – which rather confusingly is the title of a completely different jeu d’esprit, written at a similarly tender age and also not intended for publication. But if you haven’t already, read those six: you have a treat in store. And let’s those of who already have done so, read them again this anniversary year. In these unsettled times, her wit and humanity proved the tonic we need.