Everything We Know and Love About Jane Austen

Lizzie Dunford: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey. Patricia Matthew: The students in my classes, I ask them sometimes why they signed up for a class. And over half the class will say, we're here to read Austen. She published anonymously. We know almost nothing about her personal life—or even what she truly looked like. But over two centuries after her pen left the page, Jane Austen’s words still move readers around the world. What is it that keeps us coming back to her again and again? Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Hampshire, England. Like many of the characters in her novels, Austen’s family was solidly middle class. With seven siblings and a father who worked as an Anglican clergyman, she would have been expected to secure her financial future through marriage. But Austen never married, though she did receive at least one proposal. She lived on a modest budget and spent most of her time in the countryside, away from fashionable cities like London. She used her position from within society to satirize it, poking fun at self-serious vicars and meddling mums. She also crafted what some readers consider to be the most beautiful love stories ever told. Patricia: Austen writes to her niece that three or four families in a village is the thing to focus on. And her novels do that. So in some ways, the novels are about very small worlds, and they're detailed character sketches with witty commentary. Lizzie Dunford: She's an acute observer of the way that people feel, of the way that they interact, of those hurts and cuts and how you get over emotional pain and move forward. And so much of what happens within her pages can happen to anybody. Elizabeth Bennet’s fierce protectiveness over her sisters and Emma’s urge to meddle in her friends’ love lives are real traits we recognize in real people, including ourselves. Each time we read Pride and Prejudice, or watch Alicia Silverstone gallivant around Beverly Hills as a ’90s Emma, we can experience those feelings anew. And though Austen’s contemporaries didn’t have Clueless—or even know the name “Jane Austen”—they loved her novels just the same. When Sense and Sensibility was released in 1811, it was identified simply as “By a Lady.” It was not until Northanger Abbey was published after Austen’s death in 1817 that one of her novels included a "biographical note” —in this case, a letter from Jane’s brother Henry that identified her as the author. Lizzie: Just because she was publishing anonymously did not mean that her works were not well-known and not well-read at the time. Pride and Prejudice in particular was an extraordinary success. Patricia: It was incredibly brave of her to be an ambitious writer. When we look at a woman writing at a time when women were not even supposed to be indulging their imaginations, never mind creating imaginative texts, Austen does this. And that's a political act. Today, we know little about Austen as a person. Most portraits are based on a single sketch by her sister, Cassandra. And though the Austen sisters wrote each other hundreds of letters, Cassandra burned most rather than risk them being made public. Only 160 letters written by Jane remain. Lizzie: There is no clear-cut picture either in words or in paint of Austen. Which in some ways, and in a particular way, has contributed to that longevity, because everyone is able to read the source materials and create their own Jane Austen. And that's probably a good thing rather than a bad thing. Patricia: She wanted to tell stories, and she wanted the world to read those stories. And read them we do. Since its publication, Pride and Prejudice has never once been out of print. It has sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Patricia: Her craft is endlessly pleasurable. So sometimes it's the pleasure of knowing that there's a scene coming that's going to make me laugh or make me cry or give me pause. And sometimes it's looking at a passage I think I know really well and discovering some new wrinkle in it, some new sly comment that she makes. Lizzie Dunford: I would like people to think of Austen not as a romance writer, but a writer of deep human truths who does it with such fun and humor and wisdom. Rather than being soft, these novels had a strength and a power that enabled them to last at least two centuries. And I suspect they'll be read for many centuries to come.