III.

Literary Achievement

Austen's six finished novels represent an extraordinary achievement and an important development in the history of the English novel. To her nephew, J. Edward Austen, she was self-deprecating about her work, writing of “ the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour”, and to her niece, Anna Austen, she announced “3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on”. Yet there is nothing limited about her novels. Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1815, “the big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me”. Austen turned her back on the Gothic novel form, of which an example is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, first published in 1818, the same year as Persuasion and Austen's own satire of the Gothic form, Northanger Abbey. Instead, eschewing melodramatic plot contrivances and supernatural interventions, Austen wrote domestic fiction, putting the dynamics of human relationships into a sharp and often critical focus.

A.

Early Work

Her early novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, she later criticized as too brilliant and light, but they remain her best-loved and funniest books. Sense and Sensibility tells the story of Elinor, with her “strength of understanding” and “coolness of judgement”, and her younger sister, Marianne, whose “excess of ... sensibility” leads her to respond with imprudent haste to the romantic overtures of Mr Willoughby, only to discover her mistake too late and fall into inconsolable grief and illness. Her sister, Elinor, meanwhile, is repressing with effort her own love for Edward Ferrars. The book is at once a high-paced comedy and a serious examination of a society which unfairly requires women to perform in public while simultaneously maintaining strict limits of privacy. Elinor hides her feelings, Marianne displays hers, and both are thoroughly unhappy as a result.

Pride and Prejudice, a similarly high-spirited book, which chronicles the fortunes of the five Bennet sisters and their marital prospects, opens with the famous line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” This is typical of Austen's authorial voice, which she uses to comment wryly on the conduct of her characters, and indeed, on the values of society itself. Henry Austen, in his Biographical Notice, wrote: “Everything came finished from her pen; for on all subjects she had ideas as clear as her expressions were well chosen”; and brilliance of finish, poise, and elegance indeed characterize her use of language throughout her writing. Austen's novels are often described as “witty”, but hers is not a superficial or facile wit: it is rather a wit which penetrates the depths of human character, and then surfaces again with a finely turned phrase that records everything seen there.

Northanger Abbey is a romping satire on the Gothic novel form which opens: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.” Catherine comes from a thoroughly happy, healthy family which shows no signs whatsoever of the “Romantic” decline or tragedy which conventionally mark the earliest years of a Gothic heroine. Nevertheless, Catherine reads so many spine-chilling Gothic horror stories that she begins to see mysteries everywhere, until Henry Tilney has to remind her, “Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable.” Catherine has been so busy constructing her own fantastic fictions, that she has ceased to notice the real, ordinary drama that is playing around her.

B.

Later Work

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.