Jane Austen: Six Best Novels

Although we've mourned Jane Austen for 200 years this month, she's an author who's been kept alive by readers, not by critics and academics. One of my happy fantasies is that Austen would have lived and written into the Victorian Era, producing a full dozen more books (I'm not greedy). As is, we have the six novels (or 6½ if one counts the epistolary novella Lady Susan, as I do). As far as I know, they were written in the following order: Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. That's what and when, but how do they rank? My, I hate to be predictable, but right is right. First is Pride and Prejudice for its great characters, starting with Lizzy and Mr. Darcy: the romance works. And who can't help but feel for sweet, patient Jane? Plus there's the insufferable Lady Catherine and her toady, Mr. Collins, the foolish Mrs. Bennet and the beyond foolish Lydia. So many great characters stirred into the plot makes a great novel. Next is Northanger Abbey, which lacks the depth of the other novels, but it is just such good craic, such a rollicking good time that I love it to pieces. Third, Sense and Sensibility, the two sisters being the two sides of the shilling, and both being the complex Jane Austen. Emma, fourth, being both overlong and rarely eventful, depends entirely on the charm of Emma Woodhouse: she is unlikeable perhaps, but irresistible. Every bit of her conceit and vanity is still charming. She, in time, unlike so many, recognizes her failings. Lady Susan isn't quite as good as the film it inspired (Love and Friendship), but is still fascinating if only to see the resilient and resourceful Lady Susan herself, a stronger character than any other Austen ever wrote (perhaps an early incarnation of Mary Crawford?). Sixth, is Persuasion, as good and as well-written as any other Austen novel, even if its quiet excellence fails to have equally captivating characters. And my least favorite, Mansfield Park, although damaged by the judgmental, self-righteous prig Fanny Price (for whom no one in the world is an acceptable human being, and whose happily-ever-after depends on someone's death), is still redeemed by Mary Crawford, who is Jane Austen become print.

Austen's novels have been criticized (severely, see Twain, Mark) for being simple novels of manners, white women worrying about getting married (due to Britain's eternal wars the pool of men was small). And while sometimes Austen does seem blind to social conditions (so few servants ever have names), at others, even if she's no Dickens and it's hidden between the lines, the social and economic desperation is laid bare. Good family was still essential, even in the social norms were changing. Many young women were a sound marriage away from disaster, poverty or starvation. That's why Lizzy Bennet is so brave to reject Mr. Darcy. That's why Charlotte Lucas willingly marries the odious Mr. Collins: her options are few and security, a roof above and food on the table, is more valuable than love, than being an impoverished spinster. Austen herself was not as wealthy as her characters. Although Austen's works aren't the unrelieved satire her most fervent supporters would assert, her gentle satire (okay, sometimes vicious, though on the individual and personal level, skewering the rude, hypocritical, spineless, and yes, hypochondriac) was one of the sharpest tools in her belt. There's a pattern of twisting Austen's writing to suit personal objectives: she was conservative, she was radical, she would've supported suffrage, she would have opposed it, she would have pushed for Brexit ... . But what is best about Austen in that her stories are fairy tales, with a moral, with rules that have penalties, a world without sudden deaths, we know evil will not win, and there's always a happily-ever-after. Her novels are also intelligent, her characters having well-rounded interior and exterior lives, examining and knowing themselves and others. Reading her novels we do the same, living within her world and within ourselves, for just a little while.  🐢