The searchlight that Jane Austen’s writing continues to beam

Jane Austen is one of the few English novelists who can be read with absolute pleasure by anyone, at any time, in any place, the renowned novelist AS Byatt had stated. In Jane Austen’s 250th birth centenary year, exuberant celebrations and special events in England and elsewhere reiterate her creative greatness as a novelist, one whose delicately inked works continue to remain relevant, loved, and evergreen.

A dedicated and disciplined writer, Austen wrote “in neat handwriting”, we are told, “at a small writing desk in a quiet corner” of a room used by the family as well. Her engrossing plots, use of comedy and subtle irony were delivered in deceptively seamless language that held deep undercurrents of thought.

Her vividly imagined scenarios depicting the treacherous waters of courtship, romance, love, and the relentless pursuit of ‘suitable’ alliances in marriage, gained popularity over time with Indian readers too.

To date, enticed by the twists and turns of suspenseful plots in Austen’s six novels — ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Northanger Abbey’, ‘Emma’, ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Persuasion’ — her fan readership finds lines and characters embedded within their own memory.

The opening much quoted line from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ possibly holds pride of place, for its succinctly worded equation — “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

A sharp piece of witty sarcasm from ‘Emma’ is carried in another oft-quoted line — “There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.”

Austen’s depiction of the everyday domestic way of life of the late 18th and early 19th century England, accompanied by her penetrating psychological understanding of the human predicaments of the “head” and “heart”, have been much appreciated by novelists and literary critics.

“Her novels give us a more accurate picture of her society than any contemporary historian could,” observes the influential literary critic FR Leavis. The literary historian George Saintsbury comments: “She is a perfect artist and never misses the mark.”

It comes as no surprise therefore that the meticulous art of Austen’s novels has transcended set literary tastes and fashions, crossed national and linguistic boundaries, and been successfully translated into popular cross-cultural cinematic adaptations like Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Bride and Prejudice’ (2004).

“How widely, how wisely, how humanly she wrote,” the celebrated 20th century feminist writer of the stream of consciousness novel, Virginia Woolf, observes about Austen. Embedded in the concrete realities of land, estate, and occupations of her time, she drew her gamut of interesting characters from the contrasting worlds of both the privileged aristocracy and middle class families.

As an astute observer of human nature, Jane Austen posited the coexistence of the strengths and weaknesses that she observed as a given in most individuals. To pick out a few illustrations from her novels, Mr Wickham and Henry Crawford are handsome charmers who are manipulative and exploitative. Elizabeth Bennett and Emma, though intelligent and sensible, must take lessons in humility. The reserved Fitzwilliam Darcy from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ necessarily needs to open up emotionally and communicatively, after Elizabeth Bennett has rejected outright his love.

Sifting worldly, materialistic character types at one end of the spectrum from the kind, principled and virtuous ones who hold firmly to their moral values, Austen provides mirrors for us to self-reflect and improve ourselves.

Her perceptive mind scans and exposes the intangible, repressed bubbles of thought and emotion that are seldom voiced by her characters, except within their own consciousness.

Was Jane Austen a conservative who upheld the values of English supremacy and empire? This and other related questions have been raised in postcolonial critiques of her works. Nonetheless, for the general reader, what ultimately casts a spell is Austen’s skill in telling the tale in seamlessly worked out plots, in making characters come alive while deliberating on the themes of reason and emotion, love and marriage, social class and matrimony, patriarchy and gender, innocence and deception.

The searchlight she beams for us as a novelist, historian, psychologist, and moralist brings awareness, insights and enduring delight. What we could usefully take away in addition, in a world increasingly marked by the fragility and uncertainty of human relationships, is Austen’s emphasis on the primacy of ‘morals’ and ‘character’.

— The writer is former Professor of English, University of Rajasthan