Jane Austen: For the Ages
by Detrea Moullett

From 1775-1827, Jane Austen graced the world with her presence as a well known English author.  Austen wrote only six complete novels and made only about 630 pounds from them during her lifetime (Lane, 1996).  She never traveled outside of southeast England, and yet Austen is one of the world’s favorite authors, except for Mark Twain who detested her work.  There are thousands of blogs about her, like my own.  Fans, including myself, tour England looking for the places she lived.  The Jane Austen Society has chapters all over the world, and her books are continually being remade into movies. Why is it that Jane Austen is still so popular two hundred years later?


One Size Fits All

There is something in Ms. Austen’s works for everyone. Martin Amis, quoted in Natalie Tyler’s book The Friendly Jane Austen, states that “Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy.  The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials.”  Tyler says that to some people, she is a comforting romance, and to others, the world depicted in her novels is an ideal “in which goodness is always rewarded” and which “represents the attainable reality of a pleasantly well-ordered life.”  Austen makes readers laugh out loud with her acerbic irony.  And then there are those who read the feminism between the lines, and who find the anger about women’s lack of choices lurking under the civility.


The Finer Things in Life

In Austen’s novels, Tyler notes that “with the exception of Emma, her heroines have significant economic problems,” and she always reports just how much or little her characters actually have.  This is not avarice.  Instead, this helps them seem more like us.  Neither Austen nor her characters would ever rate a Jackie Collins novel or a reality TV show living the high life.

While Jane Austen earned very little during her lifetime, she enjoyed visiting her relatives who could serve her good food.  In The Friendly Jane Austen, “her letters to Cassandra she often mentions what delicacies she has eaten” and particularly liked syllabub, a “popular drink mixing milk and alcohol.”  She loved dancing.  When I visited the cottage in Chawton where she lived during much of her publication years, the curators had a display in the shed on the property listing the men in her life.  She evidently liked to flirt, and there was at least one serious romance in her life.  Austen’s family was very fond of her, and her fans think of her as a friend.


Oh, the Irony

Jane Austen was the daughter of a clergyman, but her novels are not preachy.  Instead, she uses wit to skewer characters that do not live decent lives, according to her.  In Jane Austen’s World, “her novels, the characters who incur their author’s disapproval are almost all careless of the comfort of people among whom they happen to live”.   She disliked snobs and silly people.  In Jane Austen, the “ability to know oneself and to read the people in one’s life is essential to becoming a discerning adult.”

Austen’s descriptions of Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park (who is willing to volunteer others’ help as long as it does not involve any effort on her part) and Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice (who is full of himself due to his association with Lady Catherine De Bourgh and her multiple chimneys) leave readers laughing out loud.  She even unleashes her wit at a non-living character in Northanger Abbey, the gothic novel.  As this was the popular type of novel during Ms. Austen’s time, she would have read them.  In essence, she was laughing at herself.


And the Pen Goes To….

According to David Riede, in an interview with Natalie Tyler, “Austen’s innovations were so effective and influential that they became incorporated in the novels of the next two hundred years, so that her contributions to the art of novel writing have almost become to look “natural” to later generations-not innovative in art but simply the way novels are.”  A Jane Austen novel is genius, a “world of subtlety and characterization and intricate diction.”

Jane Austen’s novels expresses the viewpoint that women should have the choice to marry whom they want, not just for financial security or because it is expected of them.  She herself refused a marriage proposal a day after she accepted it because she did not love the man, thereby giving up financial security.  Tyler notes that other reasons for this refusal are not known, but “at the time of the offer [she] had completed three major novels and had offered one to a publisher.”  At that time, marriage would be been incompatible with a writing career.  Her “heroes… are prepared to respect their wives [and]…none of Austen’s heroines will be passive wives.”

One of my favorite memories of my trip to England was seeing Jane Austen’s writing desk in the British Library in London.  A small thing, to be sure, but to a Jane Austen fan the desk on which she wrote is better than all the crown jewels on display in the Tower of London.  And there are legions of Jane Austen fans.  We’ll continue to reread the books, watch each new movie version, write our blogs, and traipse around England.  Jane Austen is a growth enterprise.



All information from the following books (which just happened to be on my bookshelf):

Austen, Jane.  Her novels, in all shapes and sizes, by several different publishers.

Lane, Maggie.   Jane Austen’s World.  Carlton Books, 1996

Tyler, Natalie.  The Friendly Jane Austen.  New York: Penguin, 1999