Pride and Prejudice was a prescribed text for us in school. That set me off on the trail of Jane Austen and I ended up reading her six novels. Long before I understood her fame, long before I studied her with academic rigour for an Honours course, I became a confirmed ‘Janeite’. The daughter of the rector of several parishes in Hampshire, she led a circumscribed life, yet her writings critique and comment on the British landed gentry of the time.
Austen’s exquisite touch rendered commonplace things and characters interesting. For someone who led “a life without incident”, her work appropriately lacks drama, intrigue, raging passions or tear-jerking tragedy but still engages our perennial interest. Nothing more momentous happens in her novels than walks in the shady groves of the English countryside or a ball at a manor house. In fact the essayist Robert Lynd said that Austen’s characters “are people in whose lives a slight fall of snow is an event.”
Her novels centre around holy matrimony through matches and mismatches till the suitable boy for the suitable girl is found and the workings of destiny are validated. Her superbly rendered domesticity and her drawing room conversations laced with philosophy render ordinariness extraordinary. She wrote with characteristic modesty: “A little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour”. Posterity will assure her it is enough to fascinate generations of readers.
Austen wrote to be read and reread. Her finely-crafted novels appreciated by the academy and general public alike lend themselves with ease to film and stage adaptations. Lady Susan, her earliest work, was published posthumously; it was recently filmed as Love & Friendship and received rave reviews.
This year, the 200th death anniversary of the immortal Jane is commemorated by the historian Lucy Worsley through her biography Jane Austen at Home: A Biography that leads us into the rooms from where the beloved novelist quietly changed the world, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her.
Not all country houses and ballrooms, life was a painful struggle and she passionately defended her freedom. She had several marriage proposals but she would not settle for any one less than Darcy. And Mr Darcy existed only in the pages of her celebrated novel. Gracing every syllabus and every reading list, she has occupied a hallowed place in the realm of English literature. Every reader’s delight and every writer’s aspiration, in the words of J K Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, “Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.”