Jane Austen’s three early novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey—form a distinct group in which a strong element of literary satire accompanies the comic depiction of character and society. In the three novels of Jane Austen’s maturity—Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion—the literary satire, though still present, is more subdued and is subordinated to the comedy of character and society.

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility (1811) tells the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters. Marianne is the heroine of “sensibility”—i.e., of openness and enthusiasm. She becomes infatuated with the attractive John Willoughby, who seems to be a romantic lover but is in reality an unscrupulous fortune hunter. He deserts her for an heiress, leaving her to learn a dose of “sense” in a wholly unromantic marriage with a staid and settled bachelor, Colonel Brandon, who is nearly 20 years her senior. By contrast, Marianne’s older sister, Elinor, is the guiding light of “sense,” or prudence and discretion, whose constancy toward her lover, Edward Ferrars, is rewarded by her marriage to him after some distressing vicissitudes.

Emma

Of all Austen’s novels, Emma (1815) is the most consistently comic in tone. It centers on Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman who indulges herself with meddlesome and unsuccessful attempts at matchmaking among her friends and neighbors. After a series of humiliating errors, a chastened Emma finds her destiny in marriage to the mature and protective George Knightley, a neighboring squire who had been her mentor and friend.

Legacy: Why Jane Austen remains relevant

Compared with the works of many of her contemporaries, Jane Austen’s novels continued to enjoy large readerships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Indeed, her well-crafted and entertaining stories about smart young women—and her deft treatment of issues of power, class, and gender—have retained their relevance, speaking to “universal truths” about love and happiness (to echo the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice).

Although the birth of the English novel occurred in the first half of the 18th century primarily in the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, it is with Jane Austen that the novel took on its distinctively modern character in the realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the unremarkable situations of everyday life. In her six major novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time, revealing the possibilities of “domestic” literature.

Her works also show an artist who was consciously working through—and critiquing—the literary and social conventions that had been established in the 18th century. Austen wrote her novels during the transition from the Enlightenment (and its focus on reason and skepticism) to Romanticism (and its idealization of emotion and the imagination). Considering her satires of sentimental writing and its emotional excesses, she is sometimes viewed as a “pro-Enlightenment” author. But just as she was not simply a writer of boilerplate romantic plots, she was not simply an anti-Romantic. Austen’s heroines are women of deep feeling who undergo profound personal growth. Their differences in character—the proud Lizzy Bennet, the spontaneous Marianne Dashwood, the prudent Anne Elliot—and their similar predicaments as women living in an era of mercenary marriages serve as sharp critiques of a strictly transactional—and rational—approach to love.

Moreover, Austen’s skill went far beyond clever parody. Her narrative technique in Emma, for example, is a pioneering example of free indirect discourse (or free indirect speech), a type of subjective narration that closes the distance between the reader and the character, thereby helping the reader to see through the character’s eyes. Throughout the novel Austen passes between her heroine’s own thought processes and a more straightforward, traditionally third-person narrative voice.

The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of expediency. Mr. Elton’s situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connections; at the same time not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet. He had a comfortable home for her, and Emma imagined a very sufficient income; for though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property; and she thought very highly of him as a good-humoured, well-meaning, respectable young man, without any deficiency of useful understanding or knowledge of the world.

The passage evokes Emma’s consciousness but allows the reader enough ironic distance to recognize her delusions.

Austen’s repeated fable of a young woman’s voyage to self-discovery on the passage through love to marriage focuses upon easily recognizable aspects of life. It is this concentration upon character and personality and upon the tensions between her heroines and their society that relates her novels more closely to the modern world than to the traditions of the 18th century. It is this modernity—together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style, her shrewd, amused sympathy, and the satisfaction to be found in stories so skillfully told, in novels so beautifully constructed—that helps to explain her continuing appeal for readers of all kinds. Modern critics remain fascinated by the commanding structure and organization of the novels, by the triumphs of technique that enable the writer to lay bare the tragicomedy of existence in stories of which the events and settings are apparently so ordinary and so circumscribed.

Notable adaptations

The enduring popularity of Austen’s books can be seen in the numerous film and television adaptions of her work. These include Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), which stars Emma Thompson (who also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay), Kate Winslet, and Hugh Grant. Pride and Prejudice was notably adapted into a 1940 movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier and a 1995 BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. Other film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice include Bride & Prejudice (2004), directed by Gurinder Chadha and starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan; a 2005 film featuring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen; and Fire Island (2022), starring Joel Kim Booster. Mansfield Park was covered in a 1983 miniseries, a 1999 film, and a 2007 TV movie. Treatments of Emma include a 1996 TV movie, a 1996 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and a 2020 movie starring Anya Taylor-Joy.

Austen’s novels have also spawned modern reimaginings in several formats. Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, which follows the ups and downs of a single thirtysomething woman in London, was based on Pride and Prejudice; in 2001 it was adapted into a movie starring Renée Zellweger and Austen adaptation veterans Firth and Grant. The series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012–13) is another retelling of Pride and Prejudice, presented as a vlog (or video blog). Clueless (1995), Amy Heckerling’s comedy film set in Beverly Hills, California, was inspired by Emma. Parodies of Austen’s classic works include the 2009 novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters.

Discover more

Glossary of Jane Austen terms

List of Jane Austen film and TV adaptations

The enduring legacy of Jane Austen

English literature