Glossary of Jane Austen Terms

“Mr. Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike: he had a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners.” What does it mean to be “gentlemanlike”? What is a gentleman anyway? And how does an accomplished young woman of the early 19th century meet one? Is it good etiquette for a handsome girl to introduce herself to a gentleman possessing a pleasant countenance? Should a young woman in want of a husband consider a gentleman a likely prospect if he is a valetudinarian or an apothecary? If these terms and tropes sound familiar, you may be a Jane Austen fan. Between 1811 and 1817 the English writer published six novels of manners that detailed the social dos and don’ts of the Regency era. Learn the difference between a baron and a baronet and discover other estimable vocabulary words with this delightful glossary.

• accomplished

In the world of Austen, accomplished means someone with many talents and skills. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, much is made of 16-year-old Georgiana Darcy’s accomplishments, as snooty Caroline Bingley declares her “so extremely accomplished for her age! Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite.” The comment incites a discussion of worthy accomplishments, with Caroline’s earnest brother, Charles, marveling, “It is amazing to me…how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are.…They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this.” The question of whether these activities count as true accomplishments, however, is ventured by the arrogant Fitzwilliam Darcy, Georgiana’s older brother, who grumbles, “I cannot boast of knowing more than half-a-dozen [ladies] in the whole range of my acquaintance that are really accomplished.” In a sly way, Darcy’s arrogance highlights an important point about Austen’s heroines: They are not especially accomplished, but their value lies in their strength in character.

• apothecary

In the 19th century, apothecary referred to someone who prepared and sold medicines, much like a modern-day pharmacist. Apothecaries were also called to dispense advice in rural communities, but unlike a physician, they were not university-trained. In Austen’s novels the choice of who to call to treat an illness or injury reflects the characters’ social pretensions (or lack of them), as in Pride and Prejudice, when Charles Bingley’s snobby sisters recommend the services of “one of the most eminent physicians” in town instead of the “country advice” of a rural doctor. Notably, physicians diagnosed their patients through observation and medical history, not through physical examination. That would involve the services of a surgeon, who performed hands-on work such as bone setting and bloodletting. In Austen’s time, however, there were surgeon-apothecaries who combined the skills of both roles, as in Persuasion when an apothecary is called to fix a dislocated collarbone.

• barouche

As with doctors, Austen conveys much about her characters’ status and personal tastes through their means of getting around. In Emma, for example, the titular heroine mocks the nouveau riche Augusta Hawkins, whose elder sister is “very well married, to a gentleman in a great way, near Bristol, who kept two carriages!” In general, a carriage is a four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle. Another word for a carriage is coach, although this term can specify something more opulent or a hackney (a carriage for hire). A gig—as in the “odious gigs” detested by Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey—is a lightweight, two-seat, one-horse vehicle driven by one of the passengers instead of a hired driver. On the posh side is a barouche, a roomy four-wheeled carriage pulled by two fine horses. Barouches also have collapsible hoods, making them ideal for summer “exploring parties.” Other vehicles with folding hoods include the two-wheeled chaise and post chaise, the latter of which traveled the mail routes and was typically driven by a postillion who rode the left horse instead of sitting on a driver’s box; the sporty four-wheeled, passenger-driven phaeton, an open-air carriage without doors; and the four-wheeled landau, which had two folding hoods, one at each end, that could be pulled open for a “moon roof” effect.

• countenance

One of the most common Austen terms, countenance refers to a person’s facial expression or features. A few of the adjectives used to describe her characters’ countenances are “gloomy,” “pleasing,” “pleasant,” “pensive,” “grateful,” “gracious,” and “sensible.” Indeed, through their countenances, Austen reveals all kinds of moods and personality types. In the first ball scene in Pride and Prejudice the rich and handsome—but also proud—Darcy gets a devastating dress-down in Austen’s cool prose: “not all his large estate in Derbyshire could save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance.” Austen also refers to her characters “keeping” their countenance—meaning, keeping their calm or sense of composure.

• dandy

Although dandy is not used in any of Austen’s novels, the term refers to an important social figure that emerged in late 18th-century England. As epitomized by real-life gents such as Beau Brummell and, later, Oscar Wilde, a dandy is a man who pays fastidious attention to his appearance and social position. Other Regency-era terms for men include beau (which could mean a dandy or simply a gallant suitor), buck (a dashing sporty type), Corinthian (a playboy or pleasure-seeking sportsman), rake (a dissolute womanizer or libertine), and rogue (a scoundrel or otherwise wayward bad boy). Austen fans take delight in classifying her male characters. Henry Crawford is Mansfield Park’s flirty and fickle dandy, while Northanger Abbey’s John Thorpe is a mere wannabe. Memorable rakes and rogues, for example, include Persuasion’s opportunistic charmer William Elliot, Sense and Sensibility’s unscrupulous fortune hunter John Willoughby, and Pride and Prejudice’s inveterate gambler George Wickham. The latter novel’s two starring beaus are, of course, Darcy and Bingley.

• entail

Austen’s prose is famous for its wit and precision, but her books are also deft explorations of power and gender. Indeed, the plots of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice center partly on the implications of entail, a law that limited the transfer of property to a specific line of heirs. Under the related law of primogeniture, only male heirs, and specifically the eldest ones in a family line, were granted property. While entailment meant that a family held on to its property, it also meant that daughters and other female heirs could become dispossessed. The sudden impoverishment of the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility is the result of an entail. After their father dies, the family estate is left to their half brother, instead of to them or to their mother. Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice, which is set partly at the Bennet family’s entailed Longbourn estate, Mrs. Bennet’s obsessive efforts to marry off her daughters stem from her awareness of the realities of an unmarried woman’s fate.

• gentry

As the foremost chronicler of Regency society, Austen populated her novels with members of various social classes to illuminate their vastly different stations in life. Yet many of her characters are members of the gentry, a privileged class that was a notch down from the aristocracy. What’s the difference between these two groups? In Britain, aristocracy, or nobility, refers to those members of the upper class who possess a hereditary title, making them part of the peerage, which shares the responsibility of government. The five ranks of the peerage are, in descending order, duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron. The gentry, by contrast, are technically commoners, albeit ones who possess land and wealth. Although not peers, they may hold honorary titles such as baronet or unofficial titles such as squire, the name for the principal landowner in a village or district. Austen’s gentlemen characters—including Darcy and Emma’s George Knightley—come from the genteel English gentry.

• Gretna Green

In all of Austen’s novels, readers follow her heroines through their courtships with ideal and not-so-ideal suitors. They become engaged, they break their engagements, they experience heartbreak, they get married. Austen is not the only one who plays matchmaker. In Emma, her well-meaning heroine arranges matches in the misguided confidence that these setups will lead to a “happily ever after.” As in the 21st century, an engagement in Austen’s time meant a promise or an agreement of marriage. Customarily, men did the proposing. If a woman accepted a man’s proposal, it was proper etiquette for him to then seek her father’s permission for the marriage. Unlike the common (though not universal) modern tradition, engagement rings were not exchanged upon making a proposal. Instead, lovers might exchange gifts as tokens of their affection, as when John Willoughby cuts off a lock of Marianne Dashwood’s hair as a keepsake in Sense and Sensibility. If a couple wanted to avoid this rigmarole, they could elope, preferably to Gretna Green, a village just across England’s border with Scotland, where the law at the time allowed for hasty marriages. Indeed, fans of Pride and Prejudice may recall the alarm caused by the news that young Lydia Bennet has run off to Gretna Green with the scoundrel George Wickham.

• ha-ha

Austen’s books have many comical moments, but in Mansfield Park the term ha-ha refers to a sunken fence, not an LOL scenario. In the novel Fanny Price and others from the Bertram family’s estate (the titular Mansfield Park) visit Sotherton, a neighbor’s rambling, old-moneyed estate with a garden and a contiguous “wilderness” containing deer. The book describes members of the party “looking over a ha-ha into the park.” At one point Fanny even warns one of her companions against “slipping into the ha-ha”—not an unlikely possibility considering that a ha-ha is essentially a ditch with a low wall on one side. A common feature in English landscape design, ha-has were devised to conceal a physical boundary between a garden and its contiguous park grounds, allowing someone to look out over the grounds with an uninterrupted view. At the same time the division was a means to keep grazing animals, such as Sotherton’s deer, out of a garden. Its name, meanwhile, comes from the surprised reaction of a viewer who suddenly comes upon the concealed feature: “Ah! Ah!”

• natural child

In Emma, Harriet Smith, a 17-year-old boarding school student befriended by the novel’s heroine and wannabe matchmaker, Emma Woodhouse, is introduced as “the natural daughter of somebody.” In Austen’s time, natural child was a polite euphemism for a person who was born to unmarried parents. As is noted about Harriet, very little is known about her background, other than that she was placed in a local school by “somebody…several years back.” The expression also comes up in Sense and Sensibility: Colonel Brandon’s ward, Eliza Williams, is believed by some (looking at you, nosy Mrs. Jennings) to be his “natural daughter.”

• parson

In real life, Austen was the daughter of an Anglican rector. It comes as no surprise then to find many clergymen in her novels, especially vicars, parsons, and curates. Like titles of nobility, these roles occupied different power levels. A rector was the person in charge of a parish, typically a wealthier one, and he received a full income from tithes and other economic sources within the parish. Below him was the vicar, who was usually put in charge of a less affluent parish and received a partial income. Parson was a more all-purpose name for the current rector or vicar of a parish. At the lowest level was the curate, an assistant to the vicar or rector who received a mere stipend. Two examples of Austen’s clergy characters are Emma’s Mr. Elton (a vicar) and Sense and Sensibility’s Edward Ferrars (a rector…eventually). Ranking above all these men of God were the powerful bishops and archbishops, but in the world of Austen, these high and mighty figures are barely mentioned.

• Regency

In 1811 Britain’s king George III was deemed unfit to reign because of his mental illness. His son George IV, the prince of Wales, became regent, ushering in the Regency era, which lasted until the prince was crowned king in 1820. Austen’s novels detailed this era to a T, with her intricate descriptions of English country life, including its estates, balls, and social mores. Style-wise, the era’s gorgeous decorative arts drew from the structural and ornamental elements of Greek and Roman antiquity. In the modern era, the Regency style has been painstakingly recreated (more or less) for the many film and TV adaptations of Austen’s books and such fare as the popular romance drama series Bridgerton (2020– ).

• retrenchment

Wealth and the lack of it are primary concerns of Austen’s characters. Money woes play a significant role in Persuasion, a story of second-chance love that involves a plot in which the vain baronet Sir Walter Elliot throws his family and estate into debt because of his extravagance. The situation requires a scheme of retrenchment—essentially, “cutting back” or “tightening one’s belt”—drawn up by the Elliots’ family friend Lady Russell. Too proud to reduce himself to cost-cutting, Sir Walter decides to rent out his estate, Kellynch Hall, and move the family to smaller quarters in Bath.

• sensibility

When modern readers first encounter the title of Austen’s debut novel, Sense and Sensibility, they may struggle to understand the nuance between these two similar-sounding terms. Of course, Austen resolves any confusion through her two main characters: sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, one of whom represents sense (Elinor) and the other sensibility (Marianne). Sense means the same thing it does in the modern age: prudence and discretion, much like the expression “good common sense.” Sensibility, on the other hand, means openness, enthusiasm, and emotionality. Without judging the temperaments of her characters, Austen shows how the sisters’ different personalities color their approaches to life and love.

• the Ton

Except for a “blink and miss it” reference in Mansfield Park, the term the Ton is not used in Austen’s works. Regardless, Austen buffs and Bridgerton fans alike know this crowd well. Derived from the French bon ton (“good tone” or “good style”), the Ton refers to high society, a privileged group comprising the aristocracy and landed gentry. Basically, the who’s who of English society. The Ton’s world revolved around following rigid codes of etiquette and fashion. Austen’s novels are filled with insight into the complicated rules of this set. Though her heroines can make propriety look easy, her prose belies the tricky social skills needed to impress the elite, as in her description of Northanger Abbey’s Miss Tilney: “Her manners showed good sense and good breeding; they were neither shy nor affectedly open; and she seemed capable of being young, attractive, and at a ball without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her, and without exaggerated feelings of ecstatic delight or inconceivable vexation on every little trifling occurrence.” (Whew.)

• valetudinarian

Valetudinarian appears only once in an Austen novel, in Emma. Mr. Woodhouse, the heroine’s widower father, is described: “for having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years.” A valetudinarian can mean someone who is excessively preoccupied with illness (i.e., a hypochondriac) or someone with a genuinely frail constitution. The jury is out on which of these Emma’s father is. Notably, more than once he calls himself an invalid, a common term in Austen’s works to describe someone who is sickly or recovering from an illness. And he often consults the apothecary Mr. Perry, “whose frequent visits were one of the comforts of Mr. Woodhouse’s life.”

• whist

Along with such pastimes and amusements as exploring parties, balls, and novel reading, many of Austen’s characters enjoy playing card games. Those mentioned include whist, cribbage, loo, and casino. In Mansfield Park, a betting card game called speculation predicts much about the looming competition between risk-taking Mary Crawford and mild-mannered Fanny Price for Edmund Bertram’s heart. In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy Bennet drolly notes that it takes four evenings for her sister Jane and suitor Charles Bingley “to ascertain that they both like Vingt-un better than Commerce.” Modern-day card sharks and gamblers likely know Vingt-un as blackjack, while commerce is an early form of poker. Other entertainments that show up in Austen’s world are charades (not the pantomime game but a guessing game using riddles delivered in verse) and backgammon (a board game).