The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
SO SAYS HENRY TILNEY, the charming young clergyman in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, defending a genre that was taken about as seriously in Austen’s time as drugstore romances and “beach reads” are today. Novels, to high-minded early nineteenth-century readers, were trashy and sentimental, and only filled women’s heads with nonsense. Austen (1775–1817) herself came from a family of voracious readers; she said they were “not ashamed” to read novels. Austen’s works, including favorites like Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, are marked by a focus on young women in situations similar to her own: educated and imaginative daughters of the middling rich. Unlike her heroines, who depended on marriage to secure their social standing, Austen—as well as her only sister, Cassandra—never married. Test your own sense of Jane Austen with this quiz.
1. Under what name were Austen’s novels published during her lifetime?
2. What is the name of Austen’s last, never-completed novel?
3. What was the profession of George Austen, Jane’s father?
4. Which of Austen’s novels became a movie starring Kate Wins-let, Emma Thompson, and Hugh Grant?
5. What film transformed Pride and Prejudice into a Bollywood-style musical?
6. Who called Austen “the most perfect artist among women”?
ANSWERS
1. None—they were published anonymously, “By a Lady.”
2. Sanditon. Several contemporary writers have “completed” the novel, and there are versions of these finished books.
3. Rector. The rectory at Steventon, Hampshire, where Jane Austen wrote three of her novels, was destroyed by fire in 1823.
4. Sense and Sensibility.
5. Bride and Prejudice.
6. Virginia Woolf.