Austen’s novels: An overview
Jane Austen
Jane Austen’s three early novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey—form a distinct group in which a strong element of literary satire accompanies the comic depiction of character and society. In the three novels of Jane Austen’s maturity—Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion—the literary satire, though still present, is more subdued and is subordinated to the comedy of character and society.
Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility (1811) tells the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters. Marianne is the heroine of “sensibility”—i.e., of openness and enthusiasm. She becomes infatuated with the attractive John Willoughby, who seems to be a romantic lover but is in reality an unscrupulous fortune hunter. He deserts her for an heiress, leaving her to learn a dose of “sense” in a wholly unromantic marriage with a staid and settled bachelor, Colonel Brandon, who is nearly 20 years her senior. By contrast, Marianne’s older sister, Elinor, is the guiding light of “sense,” or prudence and discretion, whose constancy toward her lover, Edward Ferrars, is rewarded by her marriage to him after some distressing vicissitudes.
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1813) describes the burgeoning relationship between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich landowner. Although Austen shows them intrigued by each other, she reverses the convention of “first impressions”: “pride” of rank and fortune and “prejudice” against the social inferiority of the Bennet family hold Darcy aloof, while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the “pride” of self-respect and by “prejudice” against Darcy’s snobbery. Ultimately, they come together in love and self-understanding. The intelligent and high-spirited Elizabeth was Jane Austen’s own favorite among all her heroines and is one of the most engaging characters in English literature.
Mansfield Park
In its tone and discussion of religion and religious duty, Mansfield Park (1814) is the most serious of Austen’s novels. The heroine, Fanny Price, is a self-effacing and unregarded cousin cared for by the Bertram family in their country house. Fanny emerges as a true heroine whose moral strength eventually wins her complete acceptance in the Bertram family and marriage to Edmund Bertram himself, after that family’s disastrous involvement with the meretricious and loose-living Crawfords.
Emma
Of all Austen’s novels, Emma (1815) is the most consistently comic in tone. It centers on Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman who indulges herself with meddlesome and unsuccessful attempts at matchmaking among her friends and neighbors. After a series of humiliating errors, a chastened Emma finds her destiny in marriage to the mature and protective George Knightley, a neighboring squire who had been her mentor and friend.
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey (1817) combines a satire on conventional novels of polite society with one on Gothic tales of terror. Catherine Morland, the unspoiled daughter of a country parson, is the innocent abroad who gains worldly wisdom, first in the fashionable society of Bath and then at Northanger Abbey itself, where she learns not to interpret the world through her reading of Gothic thrillers. Her mentor and guide is the self-assured and gently ironic Henry Tilney, her husband-to-be.
Persuasion
Persuasion (1817) tells the story of a second chance, the reawakening of love between Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whom seven years earlier she had been persuaded not to marry. Now Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars with prize money and the social acceptability of naval rank. He is an eligible suitor acceptable to Anne’s snobbish father and his circle, and Anne discovers the continuing strength of her love for him.
Legacy: Why Jane Austen remains relevant
Compared with the works of many of her contemporaries, Jane Austen’s novels continued to enjoy large readerships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Indeed, her well-crafted and entertaining stories about smart young women—and her deft treatment of issues of power, class, and gender—have retained their relevance, speaking to “universal truths” about love and happiness (to echo the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice).
Although the birth of the English novel occurred in the first half of the 18th century primarily in the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, it is with Jane Austen that the novel took on its distinctively modern character in the realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the unremarkable situations of everyday life. In her six major novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time, revealing the possibilities of “domestic” literature.
Austen’s repeated fable of a young woman’s voyage to self-discovery on the passage through love to marriage focuses upon easily recognizable aspects of life. It is this concentration upon character and personality and upon the tensions between her heroines and their society that relates her novels more closely to the modern world than to the traditions of the 18th century. It is this modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style, her shrewd, amused sympathy, and the satisfaction to be found in stories so skillfully told, in novels so beautifully constructed, that helps to explain her continuing appeal for readers of all kinds. Modern critics remain fascinated by the commanding structure and organization of the novels, by the triumphs of technique that enable the writer to lay bare the tragicomedy of existence in stories of which the events and settings are apparently so ordinary and so circumscribed.
Notable adaptations
The enduring popularity of Austen’s books can be seen in the numerous film and television adaptions of her work. These include Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), which stars Emma Thompson (who also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay), Kate Winslet, and Hugh Grant. Pride and Prejudice was notably adapted into a 1940 movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and a 1995 BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. Other film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice include Bride & Prejudice (2004), directed by Gurinder Chadha and starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan; a 2005 film featuring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen; and Fire Island (2022), starring Joel Kim Booster. Mansfield Park was covered in a 1983 miniseries, a 1999 film, and a 2007 TV movie. Treatments of Emma include a 1996 TV movie, a 1996 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and a 2020 movie starring Anya Taylor-Joy.
Austen’s novels have also spawned modern reimaginings in several formats. Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, which follows the ups and downs of a single thirtysomething woman in London, was based on Pride and Prejudice; in 2001 it was adapted into a movie starring Renée Zellweger and Austen adaptation veterans Firth and Grant. The series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012–13) is another retelling of Pride and Prejudice, presented as a vlog (or video blog). Clueless (1995), Amy Heckerling’s comedy film set in Beverly Hills, California, was inspired by Emma. Parodies of Austen’s classic works include the 2009 novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters.
