Jane Austen

English novelist whose six major works, including Pride and Prejudice and Emma, established the social comedy of manners as a vehicle for serious moral and psychological insight.

Jane Austen published six complete novels between 1811 and 1818, all anonymously and under considerable social constraint, and her reputation has only grown in the two centuries since. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility are among the most widely read novels in the English language, not as period documents but as living works that readers continue to find psychologically acute and genuinely funny. Austen’s genius was to take the narrow world available to women of her class and extract from it a complete moral comedy — her subjects are self-deception, social performance, the limits of intelligence, and the question of what constitutes a good life.

Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is one of fiction’s great heroines precisely because she is smart enough to see most things clearly and still wrong about the things that matter most. Emma Woodhouse in Emma is the bolder creation: a protagonist who is charming, confident, wrong in ways she cannot acknowledge, and entirely real. Sense and Sensibility, the earliest of the three, is structurally the most schematic, but even there Austen’s intelligence subverts what might have been a simple contrast between reason and feeling.

The criticism sometimes made — that Austen is parochial, that her world excludes race, empire, and most of human suffering — is worth engaging seriously, as scholars like Claudia Johnson and Edward Said have shown. But Austen knew exactly what she was doing, and what she did within her chosen limits is without parallel in English prose fiction.