(novel, 1813)
Who would ever have expected that a quiet and unassuming novelist from the early nineteenth century would become one of the most popular writers of our own time? Jane Austen, who wrote insightful and gently humorous books about the romantic misadventures of unmarried women, has become a cultural icon, and her novels have been made into wildly popular films and miniseries. Imitators have written shelves full of books about the continued adventures of her beloved characters, or tried their hands at writing that could be labeled “Austenesque.” But none has been able to match her wit and her probing insight into human nature and human relationships.
Pride and Prejudice is probably the best known of her novels, though you will find partisans among her many fans for each and every one of them. Her initial title for the book was First Impressions, which so well captures the main theme of the book—that first impressions are often disastrously wrong. When Elizabeth Bennett, the protagonist, first meets the rich and eligible bachelor Mr. Darcy, she finds him pompous and arrogant. Thinking herself perceptive and a great judge of character, she brusquely dismisses his interest in her. That Elizabeth would reject one of the most eligible of bachelors when she herself has no money, no position, and no prospects is a remarkable assertion of her commitment to true love. Because of her initial perception of Darcy’s character, she feels that she would be marrying beneath herself—not socially, but morally. In the course of the novel both Elizabeth and Darcy realize that they have made seriously faulty judgments about the other, and both must humble themselves before they can find true love in each other’s arms.
In most of Austen’s novels, there is a key turning point that occurs when one of the characters comes to realize that they have not been realistic or correct in their notions of the world or of themselves. The protagonist comes, after many false steps, to the realization that they have seriously misjudged another or treated them unfairly. When this realization comes, it is a moment of genuine spiritual awakening, a kind of repentance that arises from recognizing their tendency to be judgmental and admitting their own proud arrogance. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, Elizabeth Bennett comes to realize that she has been blind to the faults of her family, the qualities of her would-be suitor Mr. Darcy, and the superiority and empty pride within herself:
“How despicably I have acted!” she cried. “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! . . . How humiliating is this discovery! . . . I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away. . . . Till this moment I never knew myself.”1
Such a moment of self-knowledge serves to instigate a process of interior growth in her heroine’s personality and the attainment of the virtue that Austen calls “constancy.” To be constant is to be grounded and rooted in values that persist beyond the present moment—lasting values. To constancy Austen contrasts that highly valued trait, charm. Charm is the ability to attract the attention of others without necessarily having the qualities one appears to possess. The charming person can simulate the virtues of good character by mere outward polish. Being charming is all about social acceptance rather than actually possessing admirable traits. It is concerned with how things look on the outside—how they seem, rather than what they truly are.
So often in Austen’s novels we discover that the person who has great charm is a person we later learn has poor or deficient character. And sometimes the person who may win few “style points” is eventually revealed to be a person of strong personality and depth of character, as is Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. But you would never mistake one of Austen’s books for a moral tract, for she never preaches. She observes, and she lets us draw our own conclusions. Along the way to making such discoveries, we are treated to a novel that is amusing, insightful, and well stocked with fascinating and flawed characters. She entertains us with her close observation of the human personality and she leaves us with greater wisdom about our own selves.
Jane Austen was born in 1775, the daughter of the rector of a small English parish. Unlike her books, her day-to-day existence would not have provided much fodder for a television miniseries, for she lived an outwardly uneventful life and never married. Instead she spent her time writing and caring for her family, including her nieces and nephews, with whom she was a great favorite. She wrote her books mainly for the sheer pleasure of it, concealing her work under the cover of anonymity. Until late in her writing career no one outside her family knew her as the author of these remarkable novels. Even with her own family she was reticent about drawing attention to her creative work. When someone entered the room while she was writing, she would gently slip her manuscript in progress underneath other papers on the writing desk. She seems to have had little desire for fame and recognition, and was content with her quiet domestic life.
Austen began writing when she was very young, and her surviving juvenilia shows that her natural abilities blossomed quickly, though it took her quite some time to get published. In the meantime she worked and reworked her manuscripts. Beginning with the publication of Sense and Sensibility in 1811, she produced a string of novels that exquisitely demonstrate that the ordinary human life is the great battleground upon which we all struggle to develop true moral character. After Sense and Sensibility, her novels, some of which she had been working on for years, were published in fairly rapid succession: Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1818), and Northanger Abbey (1818). In the entire history of literature there are few comparable stretches of such fertile literary accomplishment.
When Austen’s health began to fail in early 1816, her output declined, but she was still working on books when she died in 1817. Several of her unfinished manuscripts and juvenilia have been published since her death, and her books have remained in print without interruption. Numbered among her countless fans have been such eminent writers as Sir Walter Scott, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Anthony Trollope, G. K. Chesterton, and C. S. Lewis.
Austen’s great skill as an author was in uncovering the drama that lies just below the surface niceties of our daily lives, drama that emerges from romantic longings and entanglements, unspoken emotions, strained relationships, and the struggle between societal expectations and the desires of the individual person. Her novels are not epic in scope or filled with adventure. Instead, she chose a small world to write about, a world she knew well. She studied it carefully and reproduced it flawlessly. It is a world that stresses the values of virtue, reason, and moderation rather than high-flown sentiment and emotion.
Compared to those of her great French and Russian contemporaries, the moral range of Austen’s characters seems limited. Her books contain bad people, but they are not monsters—just deluded, selfish, and self-absorbed. And the virtuous characters are good people with their attendant faults—they are not saints. Austen does not see duty and morality as complicated concepts. They are not stifling and restrictive but rather essential components in the education of our passions. They are based on commonsense rules for behavior that any ten-year-old should know: honesty, respect for parents, loyalty to friends, proper gratitude to those who have been kind, and the necessity that emotions must be balanced by reason. The oft-repeated theme of her books revolves around the search for a suitable marriage partner who has these qualities and the moral lessons learned in the pursuit of that goal.
Pointing to the lack of attention to religion in the novels, and the fact that she often creates clerical characters who are amusing buffoons, some have suggested that Austen didn’t take her faith all that seriously. Perhaps this is evidence of their own bias more than anything else, for there is plenty of confirmation that this clergyman’s daughter was a woman of quiet but deep faith. While never one to join in with the religious enthusiasts (who made her rather uncomfortable), she was certainly a devout middle-of-the-road Anglican, raised on the spiritual beauty of the Book of Common Prayer.
Among the various writings Austen left behind when she died is a small collection of prayers she wrote for use with her family in evening worship. Couched in a beautiful formality reminiscent of the Book of Common Prayer, they give ample evidence of a woman whose heart and mind were touched by faith. In them she expressed great faith and thankfulness to God, and also prayed humbly for God to reveal and forgive her for her own sinful attitudes and actions. She recognized “the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes” and asked for God’s help to “earnestly strive to make a better use of what Thy goodness may yet bestow on us, than we have done of the time past.”2
Austen attended church services regularly throughout her life, and found great enjoyment in reading sermons. On her death, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh described her as one who “had lived the life of a good Christian” and said that “piety ruled her in life, and supported her in death.”3 He said that she was someone who was more concerned with living out her faith than talking about it.
For Jane Austen, all the little events of a life could be used as teachable moments to educate us in how to live better lives, free of self-delusion and arrogance. With her novels, she cast a light upon human relationships and, strengthened by the perceptions of her faith, offered her readers gentle lessons in how to become a better human being. And she knew how to make us laugh at ourselves in the face of all our follies.