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Journalism of Courage
Jane Austen 250th birth anniversary: If screen adaptations, bestseller lists, themed parties, and book club favourites are anything to go by, Jane Austen, dead for 200 years, is having a career many living authors would die for. While her novels are generally seen as love stories, Austen is an equally compelling ‘hater’, a social commentator cool, critical, accurate, and absolutely eviscerating.
So what is it about Jane Austen that her genius remains “universally acknowledged” across the globe, and more importantly, across the steep pyramid of book lovers? While a billion doctoral theses have dealt with this question, on her 250th birth anniversary, here is a condensed explainer.
Of love and money, but so much more
Austen wrote about love and money, themes that are relevant across time and space, but that is just one part of her appeal. She was not the first, or the last, author to centre her works around these themes. She was one of the best.
Austen is very scientific about her writing. While she never took a creative writing course, she employed to spectacular effect many established techniques: close interiority, precise point of view, calibrated pacing, and sparkling dialogue that advances character as much as plot.
In fact, her own words describe her process the best. Of her themes, she said, “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” And of her style, “A little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine…”
She understood that her stage of choice — English country houses with guests coming and going — was limited (two inches), but as valuable as ivory to show what is most valuable and also the most amusing to the human heart. And she showed them with a biting wit and a sizzling sense of romance.
You can thank her for popularising some of romance’s most enduring tropes: the brooding, handsome hero with a heart of gold, the spunky heroine, misunderstanding then love after self growth (Pride and Prejudice); friends to lovers after self growth (Emma); giving love a second chance after self growth (Persuasion), I could go on.
Put simply, Austen sells because her writing is so readable — funny and smart and sexy, without getting overbearing.
It is a woman’s world
Austen’s heroines have traits pop culture is still struggling to give to women — agency, wit, convictions, and the courage to act on them.
In all her books, she makes sure to mention her heroine’s wit more than she talks about their beauty. In her men, one of the first desirable qualities she highlights is “good sense”.
But beyond the pairing of bewitching woman and bewitched man, are strong, female bonds — sisters in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, friendships in Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and to a degree even in the rather drab Mansfield Park.
It does not say great things about our culture that we have to turn to a long-dead author to find feisty women who have lives and personalities independent of their male love interests, but it does contribute to said dead author’s popularity.
Jane Austen’s books are very easy to adapt to the screen. Her plots move forward mainly through dialogue, and that glistening, glowing dialogue can be lifted word for word for the screen. Also, her characters’ personalities and morals are modern by any standards and radical by none, making them safe to bring alive on screen in all ages and political climates.
By now, the adaptations-game is a self-sustaining loop. Because she is so popular, more movies and TV shows are made about her, and because so many movies and TV shows exist, her popularity is ensured generation after generation.
Two-and-half centuries on, Austen endures not because she wrote about love, but because she wrote about people — clearly, cleverly, and with unnerving precision.
