Sarah Lyall
The great British writer Jane Austen, whose 250th birthday is being celebrated this year, wrote only six complete novels and died without seeing her own extraordinary success. But few authors have had as felicitous,
or as enduring, an afterlife as the inimitable Miss Austen. Her books, exquisite comedies of manners and morals set among the landed gentry in 18th- and 19th-century England, are snapshots of their time, but timeless in their appeal.
Austen’s literary preoccupations — romance, class, morality, money — might seem light, even frivolous. But they carry universal truths, and not just the ironic one in the bravura opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” about single men, fortunes and wives.
With high wit and delectable plotting, the books skewer self-regard, hypocrisy and snobbery; lay bare unpleasant truths about the precarious position of women in Regency England and the dark origins of rich families’ fortunes; and exhibit a strikingly modern writing technique.
Using free indirect style, also known as free indirect discourse, Austen allows her omniscient narrators to inhabit the thoughts of different characters in turn,
in ways that reflect their idiosyncratic quirks of thinking and speaking — maintaining the detachment of the third person while reflecting the biases of someone speaking in the first person. While Austen wasn’t the first to employ what is now a thoroughly familiar approach, she refined and popularized it.
Austen’s life itself was perhaps most remarkable for its unremarkability. (We know less than we should; many of her letters were destroyed after her death — some by her sister, Cassandra, and others, years later,
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