Why Jane Austen is still loved more than 250 years later

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So universally beloved is Jane Austen that it’s hard to imagine a time when she wasn’t. Austen, who died in 1817 at 41, is now regarded as among the very greatest fiction writers in the English language. To celebrate her 250th birthday this December, Austenites around the globe will be attending symposiums, marathon readings and stagings of her work. Austen is a Regency-era icon. Her image plastered on coffee mugs, T-shirts, wall murals and jewellery. There is even a Jane Austen board game.

It took some time for her reputation to catch up to her genius. Even an Austen contemporary like Scottish novelist Walter Scott, a self-proclaimed fan, damned her with faint praise. He likened her fiction to “cornfields and cottages and meadows” as opposed to the “highly adorned grounds” and “rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape” that distinguished more serious fiction.

In other words, florid, pastoral girlie stuff.

Of course, the frequently rebarbative nature of what we might call the Austen industry has churned out so many bland and soapy movie and TV adaptations of her work that one can have intimate knowledge of Austen’s work without understanding what makes her great. But to truly appreciate Austen is to read her prose, which contains nothing less than the best examples of the female Regency-era consciousness to be found in any medium.

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The odds were very much against Austen, who published anonymously throughout her lifetime. In fact, so many cultural forces conspired against Austen that her corpus is as much a miracle of perseverance as it is great art. Women novelists of any literary ambition were in short supply at the turn of the 19th century, decades before the Brontë sisters and George Eliot published their novels.

For a woman to bother with fiction at all was considered unladylike, a misuse of a woman’s time that could otherwise be spent attending to domestic duties. Austen herself comments on this state of affairs near the beginning of her gothic novel Northanger Abbey, when the omniscient narrator pops out of the story to defend her art:

“There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist,” she writes. “Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.” She might have amended that last sentence to include her gender, but the implication was self-evident.

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Austen is a subversive sneak – a 19th-century British woman who writes serious fiction from the women’s point of view, a writer of romance novels that circumvents the frilly Regency-era tropes of romance. Although there is plenty of ardour in her work – both suppressed and manifest – there is virtually no physical intimacy.

Her novels are intensely gestural; a furtive glance or a flushed cheek are behavioural codes that bear great weight. But it is ultimately Austen’s prose, and the vibrant interior lives of her characters, that compel us to read her more than 200 years later.

Austen wrote six fully realized novels in her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Although Austen herself was not privy to the rarefied milieu that she so expertly dissected in her fiction – she was raised middle-class with a clergyman father – we look to her books as the sharpest, most incisive depiction of the strong, self-willed Regency woman, the beneficiary of certain customs that nurture them materially at the same time they greatly impinge on their sense of self.

For Austen’s characters, economics takes precedence over everything else; we are always aware of everyone’s net worth, of where they stand in the hierarchy of monetary needs, of how much they fall short. Relationships are fixedly transactional: Men are the sellers, women are the chattel, and it is a woman’s imperative to find a man that will support her and by extension, her family.

This is what makes Austen such a revolutionary writer and thinker. It’s not just that her novels are all drawn from the female point of view – there had been other novelists to do so. It’s that her female protagonists are smarter, more insightful and more empathic than her male protagonists, who tend to be inconstant, willful, negligent and compelled to action by base motives.

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Austen’s women make fine-grained distinctions, turn over dilemmas from every conceivable angle, reject material gain if it means sacrificing their own autonomy. When her protagonists – the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility, or Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price – say “no” to men, it is as much a courageous act of social protest as it is a personal choice.

Consider Pride and Prejudice, the novel that most Austen fans hold dearest to their hearts. Elizabeth Bennet – the coruscating wit at the centre of Austen’s marriage plot – is being pressured along with her four other sisters to marry into landed gentry, and thus save her father’s Longbourn estate, which, in modern parlance, has been refinanced to the teeth, leaving his daughters with little to live on in the event of the father’s death.

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Given 19th-century England’s patriarchal statutes that only permitted male heirs to inherit such estates, the urgency for the Bennet sisters to attach themselves to rich men verges on the existential.

Elizabeth, to the great consternation of her family, is given to a more holistic view of the world in which personal fulfilment takes precedence over the creature comforts of marriage, which can provide the “pleasantest preservative of want,” even if it is “uncertain of giving happiness” and sacrifices “every better feeling to worldly advantage.” This attitude coming from a woman in 1811 is tantamount to social insurrection verging on nihilism.

In contrast, Elizabeth’s sisters are complaisant and benighted. Lydia Bennet sparks to George Wickham, a typically unreliable Austen male character, prone to cycles of female seduction and abandonment. Jane Bennet drops into a potential union with Charles Bingley, who is charming yet boorishly self-regarding. It is Bingley’s friend Mr. Darcy who appeals to Elizabeth, mainly because she can’t get a bead on him. Sanguine and aloof, she mistakes his diffidence for indifference.

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It is the push and pull between Elizabeth and Darcy that gives Pride and Prejudice its frisson, even when Darcy exits the narrative for long stretches, leaving Elizabeth to ponder the nature of his character. When they do meet face to face (Darcy tends to materialize at the most inopportune moments), their badinage reveals two headstrong skeptics of the superficial social milieu they have to navigate.

When Elizabeth tells Darcy that, “To yield readily to the persuasion of a friend is of no merit with you,” he responds that, “To yield without much conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.” Elizabeth and Darcy have discarded the masks of Regency propriety, and are slowly, inexorably drawn toward each other by dint of their unbreakable integrity.

While it’s true that almost all of Austen’s novels end hastily with the boy getting the girl – something that Austen’s critics have regarded as a failure of nerve on the author’s part – it’s also true that this never happens without a great deal of deliberation. And why not have a happy ending, when Austen’s female protagonists engage in so much hand-wringing and prevarication to get there, and the value of a man’s estate is finally superseded by genuine affection?

As Northanger Abbey’s Isabella Thorpe reflects, “When people really are attached, poverty itself is wealth.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Jane Austen wrote in the Victorian era. She wrote in the Regency era.