Austen, Jane

Austen, Jane (1775–1817). Country parson's daughter who became one of England's best-loved novelists. As she says in Emma (1816), ‘one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’, and for some, minute attention to nuances of bygone manners makes her simple romances vapidly parochial. For others, her awareness of the realities of money and class and their bearing on human happiness will always be compelling. Though she rejected suggestions to try her hand at historical subjects, confident that ‘3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’, it is misleading to think of her as a miniaturist. The Napoleonic wars occupy her only in letters from her sailor brothers, and she is less consciously concerned with the condition of England than novelists later in the century, but her penetration and seriousness reflect an admiration for Dr Johnson. He could not have matched the sprightly ironic comedy of Pride and Prejudice (1813) but would have appreciated the more sombre moral dilemmas of Mansfield Park (1814). Three years later, still unmarried, she was dead, leaving her sister Cassandra to supervise the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818).

John Saunders