Add Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius to your watchlist
Don’t be distracted by the costumes and fluttering fans – on the 250th anniversary of her birth, it’s time to recognise that Jane Austen was a truly revolutionary writer. Why? For starters, she created an entirely new art form: the modern novel.
Austen pioneered what scholars call free indirect style, a merging of the first and third person voices, which may not sound like a big deal but means that the reader gets right inside a character’s head yet can still know more than they do. It was a game-changer. These classic Austen moves have since become our baseline expectation of a novel. For this alone she will live for ever.
We scarcely see Austen’s art form because of its ubiquity; pretty much anyone who has read any novel is under her influence. Before Austen, the novel was a straight-forward affair; in her seemingly polite hands it’s a satirical weapon of mass destruction. Her work is rich in dialogue and therefore adaptable, hence the endless TV dramas.
But even as a lifelong student of her, I confess to being a latecomer to the full appreciation of her more subversive side. It’s just that having spent a lot of time in the company of her louder contemporary, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, for me Austen seemed a bit – well, vanilla.
The two authors never met, but the very precarious nature of their lives fuelled a shared obsession with financial independence. Both were brilliant outsiders, and both died young – Austen at the age of just 41.
As the new BBC documentary series Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius shows, behind the bonnets is an ambitious wartime novelist. Britain was at war with Napoleonic France and the fear of invasion was palpable. The Austen family fortunes were precarious, with Austen and her sister Cassandra being largely dependent on their brothers’ varying incomes. Making a living writing was Austen’s way out. But there were obstacles to being published as a woman – for example Northanger Abbey was effectively kidnapped by an unscrupulous publisher who didn’t take its author seriously.
The documentary explores how she was more radical than her subject matter might suggest. The received wisdom goes that Austen didn’t do politics; she lived through the American and French revolutions but never mentions them. Salman Rushdie famously observed that soldiers only ever “show up to look cute at parties”. Then there’s the “universal truth” that she was obsessed with getting married.
But Austen witnessed the dangers of giving birth and was aware of the impact married life would have on her writing, factors that must have loomed in her mind when she rejected a marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither. The truth is Austen was obsessed with getting published and was a businesswoman.
As for the politics – it’s in her books, but through domestic settings, through the places and people that Austen knew well. Mansfield Park “forces its readers to confront the Church of England’s complicity in slavery”, according to Helena Kelly in her 2016 biography Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. And we know that one of Austen’s favourite writers was the poet William Cowper, an avowed anti-abolitionist.
Even though the church and the military are her family milieu, neither is spared her savage satire. Austen parodies class snobbery throughout, nowhere more bracingly than when Pride and Prejudice’s Lizzie Bennet squares up to Lady Catherine, insisting that “we are equal”. And what of the woman question? Where other political writers tell, Austen shows. Wollstonecraft demands “justice for one half of the human race”, whereas Austen takes us inside the lives of young women, in that brief window of agency between childhood and marriage. This short period was the only moment of freedom that a woman had before returning to a state of childlike dependence and legal nonexistence.
She would have been aware of the furore when Wollstonecraft, writing about equal rights, was torn to pieces following her early death. As that scandal played out, Austen was busy writing the book that would become Sense and Sensibility.
It’s no surprise, then, that Austen was circumspect in addressing the issues of the day, but they are there. Despite our growing distance from the culture in which she wrote, they clearly remain meaningful for us. Indeed, if anything, Austen-mania is growing.
In 1913, Virginia Woolf marvelled that “the present biography is the third work about Jane Austen that has been published in the course of the year”. Multiply this by Colin Firth and an endless thirst for Regency sauce, you have a global industry. This year alone has seen the drama Miss Austen, many adaptations being re-shown in BBC4’s Austen season, and a new series of Pride and Prejudice being made for Netflix. All from the plain wooden writing desk that now lives in the British Library.
So, here’s the question: will readers still love her books, will writers still adopt her innovations and will dramatists still adapt her words in another 250 years? If they are human, then yes.
Bee Rowlatt is the writer of Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad, co-authored with May Witwit
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