The Genius of Jane Austen
Why are the novels of Jane Austen considered classics, having stood the test of time and still beloved by readers around the world? What about the current generation, Gen Z—so edgy and cool that they can’t possibly look to Austen for entertainment, let alone guidance or wisdom, can they? Em … well, they do. There is a whole industry of Austenalia on TikTok, actually. This even though (or is it because?) Austen’s world is so markedly different from today’s and, in important respects, contradictory.
This year, as we mark Austen’s 250th birthday, we celebrate the brilliance and timelessness of her work. The words on her pages are strung together like a ribbon of pearls: elegant, rich, beautiful, and expertly woven. Her art is as insightful and charming today as it was in the century it was written.
It is no exaggeration to say that Jane Austen is situated at or very near the apex of literary genius. She occupies a place in one of those inner circles of Heaven, where only the most extraordinary of God’s creatures reside.
It is impossible to explain the insight of genius. Just think of Book Six of Plato’s Republic, for example. Or Prospero’s magic. Some things simply cannot be illuminated by definitions or words; they must be “seen” and grasped. To approach such phenomena, we have to take an indirect approach, to come at them sideways, as it were.
So let us take that approach and ask about the effect Austen has on her readers. First, and most evidently, she brings us pleasure and delight. Second, she encourages us to know ourselves. Third, she makes us better, or at least she has the power to make us better if we let her. And finally, she enlivens us when we are low and heals us when we are broken.
Pleasure and Delight
Austen’s most charming novel is Pride and Prejudice. It is “light, bright, and sparkling.” In fact, it’s nearly perfect. The spiritedness, intelligence, and wit of Elizabeth Bennet are simply captivating. In contrast, Mr. Darcy, with his odd combination of pride and bashfulness, awkwardness and dismissiveness, would hardly seem the object of virtually every girl’s dream. But he is. Individually, Elizabeth and Darcy are memorable. Together, they are pure magic.
Darcy’s love for Elizabeth is just what it should be. He loves her for who she is, and who she is is someone very much worth loving. Even when she goes awry, we know her good character will provide the means to bring her back on point. Her “pair of fine eyes” are windows to her soul and make her beautiful in Darcy’s eyes. Darcy’s love for Elizabeth makes him more attractive to us.
Self-knowledge
Like Austen herself, Elizabeth Bennet was not provided a formal education. Astonished by this, Lady Catherine de Bourgh (whose own education after all was somewhat lacking—remember, she would have been “a great proficient”—had she “ever learnt”!) interrogates Elizabeth about why she and her sisters have not been brought to London each spring to learn music and drawing from the “masters.” Or why their education has not been supervised by a governess, or at least by their mother. “[W]ho taught you?” the imperious Lady Catherine demands. “[Y]ou must have been neglected.” In comparison with some families, they probably were, Elizabeth admits; but those who wanted to learn never lacked the means: “We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary,” she informs Lady Catherine. Just as Jane Austen was left to rummage for herself among the books in her father’s library at Steventon, Elizabeth Bennet found all the “masters” she needed in Mr. Bennet’s library.
In Pride and Prejudice gossip is bandied about freely and threatens to ruin the reputation and happiness of more than one character. When repeated enough times, it apparently becomes true, even universal. No one more than Darcy was the brunt of the gossip spread throughout Longbourn and Meryton. Almost immediately upon his arrival, Mr. Darcy’s “character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world.” In contrast, Wickham is liked and admired by “everybody.” A few months after coming to Meryton, however, the truth about Wickham becomes known, and he is declared “the wickedest young man in the world.”
Despite her self-confidence in judging the character of others, Elizabeth Bennet is completely wrong about both Wickham and Darcy. First impressions (and her own vanity) lead her astray. Over time, and with a fuller and deeper knowledge of their characters and deeds, she discovers her errors and corrects her judgment.
Gossip, especially when scandalous or vitriolic, spreads and multiplies like a contagion. In the twenty-first century, this phenomenon is exacerbated by advancements in digital technology. The various platforms of social media—YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter/X, DM, Reddit, Facebook, etc.—have augmented the power and intensified the effect of rumors and false reports. For the current generation, social media platforms are the source of virtually everything they know; it is the basis of their first impressions and forms their final verdicts. It is estimated that in our country, Gen Zers spend approximately nine hours per day on their phones, or about half of their waking hours.
Social media platforms are not about dialogue and debate. They are venues that tend to corrupt rather than advance public discourse. All too often, viral posts are today’s “everybody,” whose “truth” is “universally acknowledged.” In addition to routinely eschewing the facts, social media has a particularly negative effect on users, especially the youth, resulting in feelings of isolation, loneliness, and depression.
In Pride and Prejudice, the turning point of the novel occurs in Chapter 36, when Elizabeth reads Darcy’s letter and recognizes how unjust she has been.
“How despicably have I acted!” she cried. —“I who have prided myself on my discernment! —I, who have valued myself on my abilities! … I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.”
Elizabeth Bennet’s telling insight, “Till this moment I never knew myself,” reminds us of the classical dictum: “Know Thyself.” Inscribed above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, this mandate forms the core of Socratic philosophy. The truths in Darcy’s letter paved the path to Elizabeth’s discovery of her own vanity and how it has led her into blindness, prepossession, and prejudice. As she herself admitted when she first met Darcy at the Assembly Ball and he slighted her: “I could more easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.” Now she sees that her error was largely due to willful self-deception! Her eyes are opened, and her reason is put to work again, in the service of “discernment.”
Elizabeth Bennet has learned that everything is not always as it first seems; and that often, to understand something or someone well requires time and effort. We generally begin with first impressions and/or commonly held views on a given subject; but as creatures endowed with reason, our job is to test those views, filter them, and discard the ones that cannot hold their ground. This commonsense approach to forming opinions is essentially the Socratic method and the way that liberal education liberates: it releases us from false impressions and the chains of ignorance and bias: it paves the way for the beneficial use of freedom in the form of self-mastery.
To “Know Thyself” is to know one’s abilities and limitations as individuals and as human beings. To embark on this journey, we look to the kind of masters Elizabeth Bennet invoked when she responded to Lady Catherine’s question about who educated her and her sisters. As Elizabeth implied, some books never grow old, books that hold ideas every generation should wrestle with, and will be better for if they do. Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Dante, Cicero, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Austen, Wharton, and others. But reading and learning require time and a space quiet enough to think, which means real time away from the deafening volume of the internet and social media. What is needed is the freedom to explore, discover, discern, and judge for oneself, rather than slavishly following the moment’s trends and social influencers.
Self-mastery is the developed ability to judge rightly and choose well. Of particular relevance to the youth of today is Jane Austen’s encouraging advice: “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
Moral Goodness
In Emma, we find a heroine badly in need of an education. Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition,” has been given principles, but she often doesn’t apply them. She is naturally bright—fortunately, for she routinely neglects her studies. She willfully disregards the reality around her, choosing instead to live in the world of her own imagination, where she reigns supreme. Indeed, Emma is mistress of virtually everyone and everything about her, including her home at Hartfield and the small, rural village of Highbury.
Emma is Austen’s most playful novel, literally; it is full of games, charades, conundrums, acrostics, anagrams, puns, and riddles. Not only are the characters engaged in these forms of mind play, but the readers are intended to be part of the “play” as well, a technique Austen probably learned from Shakespeare and Shaftesbury. In this novel, Austen is at work teaching us to pay attention, to read carefully, to think and to reflect, all of which prepares us to see things more clearly and judge more wisely. As in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Austen uses to set the themes and comic twists and turns of the novel, the reader is called upon to find order amidst chaos. “The course of true love never did run smooth” is due largely to the fact that “reason and love keep little company nowadays,” which certainly isn’t helped by the matchmaking mishaps of the mischievous Puck, or in the novel by Puck’s counterpart, Emma.
To mention a few of the riddles: As the scholar Mark Loveridge pointed out in the journal Notes and Queries in 1983, the title Emma is a play on Francis Hutcheson’s attempt to reduce ethics to an equation, in which M plus A equals moral perfection. (See p. 130 of this work.) In Emma, Austen is able to satirize the flawed character of her heroine and at the same time parody the notion of intuitive moral knowledge. Indeed, the art of ridicule is at an all-time high in this novel, where one of her objects of derision is the most powerful man in England, the Prince Regent. An admirer of her work, the prince had his librarian convey to Austen that she was at liberty to dedicate her next novel to him. Feeling the oblique command, but despising the adulterous, dissipated prince, the clever author devised a way to indicate her real opinion of him. In Chapter 9 there is an alternate solution to the second charade, namely, “Prince of Whales” (yes, spelled W-H-A-L-E-S), mocking His Royal Highness. The reference is also to Charles Lamb’s poem about the obese, philandering Prince Regent, titled “Triumph of the Whale,” which Austen indicates with a double anagrammed acrostic (LAMB) in the same charade.
But for all the playful twists and turns in Emma, there is a rather serious problem that drives the storyline. Emma might have been given principles, she may know the right thing to do, but all too often she chooses not to do it. She’s not vicious, but she is morally weak. She resolves to do better, time and time again, but her actions don’t match her words. And except for Mr. Knightley, everyone in Highbury enables her vanity and moral faults. For Emma, there is no “eureka” experience of self-knowledge as there is for Elizabeth Bennet. In Emma’s case, the path to clear-sightedness and moral improvement is characterized by fits and starts: slow and often painful.
Although there is no moment of self-discovery for Emma, Box Hill does represent a turning point in her self-understanding. During one of the games played during the picnic, the mixture of Emma’s quick wit and hubris verges on cruelty to Miss Bates, to which Mr. Knightley responds with blunt candor and criticism, albeit privately to Emma. In the carriage ride down the hill, Emma is left alone to reflect on her actions. Finally, moral obtuseness is cleared away. She can “see” her own failings all too clearly as she arrives at the base of Box Hill, where, incidentally, the little hamlet of “West Humble” is situated.
As Emma is brought gradually to untie her blindfold and see the world around her more clearly and accurately, so too is the reader. Like Emma, we also have our failings, among them seeing what we want to see, believing we know more than we know, and thinking we deserve more than we probably do deserve. But then nobody minds having what is too good for them, do they?
Healing and Resilience
Austen’s novels have the power to quiet our fears and soothe our spirits. You may have heard of the phenomenon of the “Janeites,” often depicted as a group of silly women dressed in ill-fitting eighteenth-century gowns, who get together to obsess over Jane Austen. The term, however, comes from a story by Rudyard Kipling, about a group of World War I soldiers who form a secret society with coded communications like “Tilniz and Trapdoors,” or the mention of Frank Churchill or Miss Bates, or, my favorite, Lady Catherine de Bugg.
In this short story, the Cockney veteran Humberstall tells how, during the war, his officers frequently referred to someone named “Jane,” which he took to be code for a secret military society. Ultimately, however, he learns that “Jane” is a reference to Jane Austen. In the harsh conditions and violence of war, Austen’s novels and characters helped them cope and keep their spirits up. Nothing like “Jane when you’re in a tight place,” one of them mused.
Kipling’s tale is not pure fiction. In the wake of the Great War and the “shell shock” suffered by many soldiers (now recognized as PTSD), one of the forms of therapy used in British hospitals was reading books aloud. The treatment produced an unexpected result: Austen’s novels proved a popular source of comfort among traumatized vets, helping to soothe the weary and heal the broken. Kipling himself knew something about this. During the war, he read her novels to his family, as they awaited word about the son who was “missing in action.”
Thankfully, most of us do not have to endure anything like what combat veterans have had to endure. Still, there is pain and suffering enough in this world, both in war and outside it, and no doubt the present time has its share or more of it. To make matters worse, literature, film, and the arts in general are saturated with images of violence and cruelty on one hand, and mawkish histrionics on the other.
According to one insightful scholar, “we are in need of a second education” that offers us a different orientation. The novels of Jane Austen provide that alternative. Unlike the brutal and sentimental literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Austen’s art accustoms “our eyes to the noble reserve and the quiet grandeur” of the classics. In Mansfield Park, she acknowledges the art of restraint she employs: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves.” At one with the classical mind, Austen understood that “it is both noble and just, and pious and more pleasant to remember the good things rather than the bad ones.”
Jane Austen was an extraordinary writer of fiction, but she was also a profound teacher of human nature, the arts of life, and the way to happiness. Her novels are, as it were, about her “important nothings”: about the sport of laughter, love and friendship, and the splendid challenge of being human.
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