The most amazing thing to me about Jane Austen is that she staunchly refuses to leave any woman behind. It doesn't matter if a woman is an antagonist, a side character, or what, the reader is assured that they will be okay. This is so different from fiction at the time or even now.
Marianne Dashwood, living a plot perfect for a tragic death by illness to preserve the beauty of her first attachment and disappointment? Nope, she lives and loves with her whole heart again. Maria Rushworth, the fallen woman who cheated on her husband does not die for her crimes or even fall into poverty or prostitution, her father and Aunt Norris will provide for her. She is punished, but she's protected. Lydia Bennet? Her two sisters will provide for her for the rest of her life. Her husband's debt will not destroy her. Miss Bates? There is an entire community around her no matter what happens and her newly rich niece will provide. No woman is even left as a governess, Miss Taylor is Mrs. Weston, Jane Fairfax becomes Mrs. Churchill instead. Mrs. Smith is pulled out of her indigent state by Anne and Wentworth.
The only woman Jane Austen allows to suffer a terrible fate is off-page and dead long before the novel begins: Eliza Brandon. Eliza Williams, her mother's affair baby, is ruined by Willoughby. Colonel Brandon could easily have washed his hands of her and her affair child, but he doesn't. Eliza Williams is going to be okay. Her child will be okay.
Antagonist women never fall into poverty or die for their crimes, most of them are even in loving marriages. Fanny Dashwood is cruel to her mother and sisters-in-law, one could imagine her falling low in karmic retribution, but no, she's fine. Lady Susan, the delightful anti-heroine, marries a baronet at the end of her novel. No punishment looms on the horizon for her promiscuity and deception. Caroline Bingley has a loving family that will never turn her away and an independent fortune. Mary Crawford has a loving sister. Isabella Thorpe may have lost the big prize, but she has her mother. Never is a woman thrown to abuse or poverty, even when they have attacked other women. The only punishment would come from their own conscience or regret for the goodness they have thrown away.
Jane Austen somehow imagines a world where even the worst women are safe.
It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday today and I just want to yell about how much modern writing (in the English language) owes to this woman.
Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.
I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!
I’ve read some early English novels, and… from a modern point of view, they are messy. Plot events are often random. Characters are generally stock archetypes. Realism wasn’t much of a concern; characters get abducted, imprisoned, etc, on a regular basis.
Slowly, from about 1770 onwards, you started to get the ‘novel of manners’ – more realistic stories set in the social world of the time. Jane Austen was absolutely not the first to write books centred on young women coming of age and finding ‘Mr Right’. (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are probably the best remembered of Austen's predecessors.)
And I’ve read some of these novels, and they’re… fine? I’m generalising hugely, but the characters are still very flat. The women are usually perfect, well-behaved, virtuous, etc; the only character flaw they might have is being naïve. Here’s a passage from one of Burney’s novels, describing the heroine:
Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal, her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding...
It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And of course it is! Novels were only just starting to solidify as a genre. The idea of making the characters flawed, realistic human beings had barely occurred to anyone. But Austen decided she didn’t want to write flawless protagonists. ‘Pictures of perfection you know make me sick and wicked,’ she once wrote in a letter to her niece.
It would be ludicrous to say that flawed characters or character-driven plots didn’t exist; of course they did. What are Shakespeare’s tragedies except stories driven by their protagonists fatal flaws? What makes Austen so remarkable is that she was pretty much the first person to take those themes from plays and put them into a novel instead. And so we have Emma Woodhouse, who gets the plot rolling by being self-deluding, meddlesome and conceited (I love her so much). We get Lizzy Bennet, who makes snap judgements that confirm her own biases and has to relearn how she sees everyone around her.
And then there’s Austen’s fucking groundbreaking way of filtering the narrative through a character’s perspective.
Austen was the first writer to consistently narrate in third person, while still filtering the narrative through one person’s point of view. If the protagonist makes a mistake, the narration sometimes just… doesn’t correct it. Take this bit of Emma. All the context you need is this: Emma thinks her friend Harriet is in love with someone, and they’ve just received news that the guy’s controlling aunt is dead, which would make it a lot easier for Harriet to marry him. Harriet is, in fact, not in love with said guy, so the news means nothing to her. But the narration says:
Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing.
Harriet isn’t behaving with great self-command! She isn’t affected by this news at all! But what Emma thinks is reported as if it were fact. We don’t get to know what Emma doesn’t; her opinion controls the narration. I cannot stress how much this had never been done before.
Or take this part of Persuasion, where the protagonist, Anne, encounters the man she was briefly engaged to eight years ago:
Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary; said all that was right […] the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it.
Look at how closely we are in Anne’s perspective here. She can hardly process what’s going on, so we barely see it. We don’t hear Wentworth’s speech. Time speeds up, the narration becomes a blur, just like the moment is a blur for Anne. No one had done this before!
We all love the Locked Tomb books here, right? You know how closely the narration sticks in each protagonist’s head; how the narration sounds and feels like their voice, how we don’t get to know anything they don’t know? Jane Austen pioneered that technique. What I’m saying is: we don’t get Gideon the Ninth without Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was a phenomenal writer, who came up with entirely new writing techniques that authors still use, hundreds of years later. So many of the techniques we now hold up as ‘good writing’ were things she did for the first time.
Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen. Thanks for giving us books as we know them.
__
(The examples here come from What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan, which is an incredible book I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to know more about the social context around her novels.)
Amanda Root + Ciarán Hinds in PERSUASION (1995), dir. Roger Michell
“I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or never.”
Jane Austen gets a lot of credit (correctly, obv) for writing banger romance and biting satire about class but I don't think we spend nearly enough time talking about how she absolutely clowns on vanity and self-importance.
Love love love how Persuasion opens with Elizabeth saying no one will want Anne in Bath and then in Bath Anne's dodging admiring glances and engagement rumors left and right like Neo with the bullets. Jane Austen was cackling over her inkpots, I just know it.
