“A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers,” Charlotte Brontë described “ Pride and Prejudice” to a friend. Everyone agreed that she captured that world with astonishing precision not everyone felt that it was a world worth capturing. The critical line on her, even from admirers like Sir Walter Scott, was that she was a miniaturist specializing in an exceedingly narrow sector of British society, the landed gentry.

They got the jokes, and you always feel good about an author when you are in on her jokes.īut Austen was hardly a best-seller, and by the eighteen-twenties her books were often out of print. In her lifetime, Austen was popular with a certain class of readers, the fashionable and well-off, who enjoyed her novels, particularly “Pride and Prejudice,” as comedies of manners. But the answer to that seems to be: It depends on who’s looking. Instead of asking what Austen is trying to tell us, we might ask what she’s trying to show us. Are those Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun?” Virginia Woolf compared her to Shakespeare: “She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. She is not just representing characters in her novels she is representing the discursive bubble those characters inhabit, and she almost never steps outside that bubble. Besides the usual difficulties involved in trying to extract a moral from works of literature, there is the problem of Austen’s irony. The letters that remain are not especially “Austenian,” and they can be a little hard-hearted and judgy, which does not match very well the image of Austen in the pious biographical sketch written by her brother Henry, shortly after her death, or in the memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published more than fifty years later, which is mainly family oral remembrance, and in which she is “dear Aunt Jane.” After Austen died, in 1817, her sister, Cassandra, destroyed or censored most of Jane’s letters to her, and after their brother Francis’s death his daughter destroyed all of Jane’s letters to him. For a writer of her renown, the biographical record is unusually thin. “What would Jane Austen say?” is a fun game to play, but the truth is that we have no idea.

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