Austen was a conservative—but an extremely witty and insightful one.
Why do we still get excited about Jane Austen? This December marks 250 years since the author’s birth, prompting documentaries, dramas and new adaptations of her novels.
Some claim Austen as something quintessentially English—like tea and stately homes built with the profits of slavery. And with no poor people polluting the landscaped gardens.
Winston Churchill said of Austen, “What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars.”
We love her because she doesn’t do politics.
But more radical voices also claim her.
Austen has been described as “Marxist before Marx” because her work portrays the economic basis of social behaviour so sharply.
In other instances, she has been described as a feminist because of the insightful way she portrays the limited choices available to middle class women.
But Jane Austen was neither Marxist nor feminist.
She was deeply aware of class, but no workers or rebellious poor darken her plots.
She understood the restrictions placed on women’s lives. But many of her female characters are vain, pretentious and plain nasty—especially to other women.
Austen was a brilliant writer. And her brilliance was shaped by the stormy political events that lay just outside her drawing rooms.
Austen was born in 1775. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published in 1811.
The French Revolution erupted in 1789. King of France Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. Britain was then at war with France from 1793 to 1815.
The threat of invasion by the French emperor Napoleon’s fleet was very real. It’s why there are so many dashing soldiers and sailors in Austen’s novels.
The British establishment was terrified that revolutionary ideas would cross the Channel—a fear very apparent in Austen’s novels.
“Infectious” strangers, with charming “Frenchified” manners and questionable morals, pop up to seduce women and threaten the established social order.
This fear of revolution sparked a war of words.
The French revolutionaries were known as the Jacobins and the anti-Jacobin novel became a genre of its own. In these novels, unrestrained emotions were portrayed as a threat.
Austen was, in general, on the side of sense, not sensibility and restraint, not liberty. She was a conservative—but an extremely witty and insightful one.
Her brilliance lay not in her observations of the details of community life and courtships. Rather, it lay in the way she used those observations to explore gender conflicts and class antagonisms.
The great lords and ladies in her novels display dangerous weaknesses. There are ossified snobs who care only about their own status and nothing about their social obligations.
There are patriarchs who are negligent or too self‑indulgent to fulfil their duties.
Their absence leaves their families and communities to fall into bad behaviour—as the decadence of the French court led to the guillotine.
There are men of quality, they just need to be reformed by a sparky or morally upstanding middle class woman.
Glittering balls and country dances are microcosms of a society riven by class divisions and constant manoeuvrings for social advantage.
The strict social codes that keep the classes apart can occasionally be breached by a woman of lower standing with great personal attributes.
Austen shows how precarious women’s lives were at this time. Those without wealth devote their lives to catching a husband.
Wealth, as Karl Marx observed, makes the ugly appear beautiful, while poverty makes beauty unlovable.
Women who fail in the marriage market face the dreariest of all existences. The spinster haunts all of Austen’s novels, as do teenage girls manipulated by predatory men.
Austen’s villains are not moustache-twirling leeches. They are plausible and sexy, but seduce women for financial gain.
Women who marry men they despise for money do not fare well. But women who marry beneath them for love do not fare well either.
Sensible women are those who marry for love—but fall for rich men.
Austen did not oppose slavery or advocate for more political or legal rights for women, as many women writers of her time did.
What she did was dramatise and satirise a world in the shadow of a political revolution and on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution.
Austen’s characters speak to us as they negotiate a society in thrall to wealth.
Their communities lie shattered by greed and class hierarchies with love and desire reduced to a marketable commodity.
