Jane Austen

The later three novels are less sparkling and the narrative is slower and more reflective. In Mansfield Park, Austen succeeds in representing a larger and more various collection of characters and locations than in her earlier work. At one level the book is a protracted love story played out between Fanny Price, the poor niece and protégé of Sir Thomas Bertram, and her cousin Edmund. Fanny, a quiet and serious girl, watches with pain Edmund's fascination with the worldly and attractive Mary Crawford, who has arrived from London with her brother to stay in the area. At another level, though, the book explores difficult contemporary issues, such as the influence of environment over character, and it also rehearses some of the conflicts caused by the rapid social change from an agricultural to an urban-based economy at the time Austen was writing.

Emma, which followed it, is a similarly mature work. Emma Woodhouse is “handsome, clever, and rich” but has “a disposition to think a little too well of herself”. The novel minutely charts the development of Emma's moral character, from egotistical arrogance and insensitivity to a better understanding of the responsibilities which accompany her social power. Austen's control of the reader in Emma is quite astonishing. While making the reader like Emma, she also makes all her faults clear, and the reader can see Emma walking into trouble, while Emma herself cannot. Emma is a technical tour de force, and also includes some of Austen's most memorable comic characters, such as Emma's hypochondriac father, Mr Woodhouse.

Persuasion is Austen's last finished novel, although she did not have time to make her usual scrupulous revisions to it. It is undoubtedly the saddest of her books: in the unfinished Sanditon, which she started to write after Persuasion, it seems that she intended to return to a buoyant, satirical mood. It has been suggested that Persuasion was written in memory of the young man Austen had hoped to marry, and the novel's tone is certainly elegiac. The heroine, Anne Elliot, is introduced not as the “very pretty girl” that she had been a few years before, but as a woman, whose “bloom had vanished early”. A love story involving Anne and Captain Wentworth which comprises “six years of separation and suffering” is the subject of the book, and even the conventional happy ending does little to alleviate the sense of disappointment and longing which permeates its pages. Its intimacy and depth make it arguably the finest of Austen's novels.

In both her letters and her fiction, Austen displayed a profound understanding of human motivations, a sharp and flexible intelligence, and also, importantly, a very human sympathy. Although some criticisms have been levelled at her (Charlotte Brontë, for instance, found her work lacking in passion), she has maintained a consistently strong readership and has been elevated to cult status by some critics. Such critics tend to read her work as feminine and genteel, but there has been a more recent wave of criticism which has pointed to Austen's vicious portrayals of a society which represses women, and looked at the ways in which she explores issues of class, economics, and social change in her work.