This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen. In 1975, I visited England to celebrate 200 years. Austen was famous then, but not the global phenomenon she is today.
I had a peripatetic childhood, with 13 changes of school, and I continued the habit of uprooting as a working adult. In 1975 I had just started a new job in America at Rutgers University and been excited to encounter the new feminism that allowed me to excavate early women writers and push them into the light. A travel grant sent me to England where I visited Chawton, Jane Austen’s last home, and Steventon, her birthplace. I relished the modest, folksy festivities – was there a greased pig or did I just remember lads proposing one? Memory, as Jane Austen so often remarked, is unreliable. I remember I bought a booklet for 40p.
I was not always an Austen fan. I escaped my isolated childhood through male adventure stories, having no time for silly romances, which I took to be Austen’s mode. But then, in an excited 1970s manner – and in common with many of my peers – I tried to read Austen “against the grain”, letting her express the anger we assumed she was repressing with her surface romance. In Sense and Sensibility, the passionate Marianne “almost” screams with agony. Let the scream ring out, we declared. In fact, Austen keeps her screams for spoilt children in this novel and, in her letters, for a niece having a tooth extracted. There was humour in American second-wave feminism but, as I experienced it, humour did not predominate. I found silly Mrs Bennet of Pride and Prejudice irritating and, when I reread Emma, I skipped the ramblings of Miss Bates and Mrs Elton; I was unentertained by the heroine’s drawing-room manoeuvres to prevent an irascible son-in-law disturbing a silly, beloved father.
What a difference half a century makes – the 250th anniversary is in full swing across the world. The internet is awash with merchandise and advertisements for fan-fiction, video spin-offs, blogs and Substacks, forcing the author and her characters into the modern roles we desire for them. I used to be sniffy about this industry, the dressing up in Regency gear for balls, weddings or sitting around companionably. Now I see it as a source of bonding, often across race, class and country. In most big towns in the US, the UK and beyond, there’ll be a Jane Austen group waiting to welcome you. (I do, however, remain uneasy at the soft-focused recreation of the cruel, corrupt Regency period as a time of elegance and fluidity in class, race and gender.)
My opinions about the novels have much changed: from my priggish youth through radical days to now, when I find that what Austen depicts is quite as daring as the adventures of lone heroes, and more complex than the imposed simplicities of 1970s readings. I see Austen’s central plot theme – the travails of courtship – as a sort of psychological adventure story.
For this 250th celebration, I was asked by Cambridge University Press to prepare new editions of the novels, as well as a book, Living with Jane Austen, describing my journey through life with her writings – a long one, for I’m twice the age she was when she died (aged 41), and four times the age of her most famous heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. On my tour to publicise the works, I visited the Austen shrines again, now tourist attractions. I spoke at the beautifully curated Chawton House Museum, that happy place from which Austen published her novels supported by a female community of her mother, her sister Cassandra and friend Martha Lloyd. I spoke also in Bath, the city she disliked and that hosts a veritable Austen industry with elegant sites and Austen merchandise. I also returned to Steventon. Surprisingly, this was much as I remembered it.
Since I missed the late bus for Basingstoke, I had time to wander and soak up its isolation. It brought home to me what I earlier ignored in Austen’s message: how much family and immediate neighbourhood mattered, how much her heroines had to swallow or, better, laugh off, to achieve a contented life amidst embarrassment, shame and discomfort. (Though dare one impose a message on so enigmatic and undidactic a writer?) Middle-class women could not then, as I had done, move on if dissatisfied with family or community. The feminism I encountered in the US rightly stressed self-assertion, self-esteem, independence and choice. How fiercely women were discriminated against when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. The goals of second-wave feminism were a necessity for us all.
Austen’s heroines nevertheless have powerful self-esteem – even the most downtrodden “creepmouse”, Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, has it in spades. But the heroines also learn restraint. The wittiest, Elizabeth Bennet, remains witty while recognising that she has indulged in “coarseness” of expression when fancying herself “liberal”. Her high-spirited teenage sister Lydia, now attractive with her sexual and verbal freedom, has, within her gendered society, nearly ruined her family. She is saved only because Elizabeth, with “formality and discretion”, has attracted a man of power, influence and money. Here Austen does appear to support, albeit in her ironic way, the need for some strategic reluctance to offend, however strong the temptation. This is not a fashionable view in 2025 amid a cacophony of angry self-expression.
Reversing my younger, more earnest self, I now love, above all, the humour that leavens and deflects in Jane Austen, the joyful fun she squeezes out of life, even at its dullest or darkest, those great family scenes of embarrassment, shame and absurdity. Of course I continue admiring Elizabeth Bennet, standing with her as she bests authority and rank in Lady Catherine, but I also delight in the insufferable characters. One of my favourites is Mrs Elton of Emma – the outsider – as I so often have been. “Mrs E” enters the snobby village of Highbury from Bristol, associated with trade rather than Home Counties gentility: she is despised by Emma, secure in her village status. But, and here’s the rub, the two young women, fixed through marriage, must tolerate each other for most of their lives. Church livings are not two a penny and the Knightleys may visit Cromer but won’t move there. Mrs Elton, awkwardly hoping to make a splash, is meant to be laughed at – we live mainly in Emma’s consciousness – but, in this, the most supremely clever of Austen’s books, we are allowed to glimpse a backstory. For this is Austen’s trick: she does not tell us what to think but rather shows us how to read, how to think. We can remain in uncertainty, hold in our minds conflicting opinions. Hers is a masterly achievement which, despite a lifetime of reading, I expect never completely to grasp.
My book Living with Jane Austen is about the vagaries of memory, about language, stillness, nature and place. For place, again I use Mrs Elton who, confronted by the strawberry-picking party that the old-fashioned squire Mr Knightley proposes, tries her best to fashion a village fete with picnic and play. Can she see the future when Donwell Abbey is transformed into a National Trust property open to anyone who will pay?
I also write much of what confronts old age – the “unruly” body. It’s a motif in Austen’s novels and letters. In both, her attitude to physical and psychosomatic ailments is bracing, in part perhaps because she judged her mother a hypochondriac, too free with detailing symptoms. In Emma, the healthy heroine views physical disease – often signified by the sore throat – quite differently from nervous ailments like headaches, fatigue and low spirits. When Emma visits her feverishly sick young friend Harriet Smith, she is praised by the obsequious vicar angling for her hefty fortune. Yes, she says: “My visit was of use to the nervous part of her complaint, I hope; but not even I can charm away a sore throat.” In Sanditon, written during her fatal illness, Austen created a whole town based on those who fancied themselves sick and those who preyed on them with quack cures and pills. With leisure and enough money, her absurd characters make sickness into a profession. As for Austen, her letters mention walking herself back to health, until that sad final decline, or taking a good dose of rhubarb. Her attitude to disease, ailments and even death is stoical, never self-indulgent, often startlingly humorous. Another useful “message” for us who now find the body insistently demanding and embarrassing. Though, dying young, she never faced old age.
In truth, Austen’s writing is not now, for me, primarily about advice. It’s her consummate style I love, her fierce irony and complexity, that often risky humour that challenges as well as comforts.
Since I first read them, Austen’s novels have spread out and round me like rich material, a shot silk of rippling ambivalence, of passion and affection, temperamental undercurrents, neediness and intellectual solitude, confusions clarified, resilience, exertion and stillness – and love (however ironised).
Open any page of her novels, and you can find a good sentence – as well as a sign of “delightful spirits, and that gaiety, that playfulness of disposition” she wrote about in Emma and that she so admired. You find beauty too.
Janet Todd’s book “Living with Jane Austen” is published by Cambridge University Press
[Further reading: England’s literary Catholic converts]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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