This sudden rupture between a narrative voice and Emma shows her as a dupe, for all her cunning and manipulative qualities—which perhaps makes the reader who doesn’t like her feel a bit sorry for her--momentarily, anyway. In Pride and Prejudice the narrative voice seems much more autonomous and free-floating, but to take my famous opening sentence as an example, it seems vaguely in touch with various attitudes and zones of awareness the different characters embody – Mrs Bennet’s overanxious predatory-ness and perhaps stupidity, Darcy’s defensiveness on behalf of his easily manipulated friend, and Elizabeth’s wit. The narrator does the work of knowing, but also summarises some of the characters at the work of knowing—or misrecognising—what is going on.

A critic pointed out that a book I read and liked, Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, hardly counts as a novel as the speech and attitudes of the narrator and characters are not differentiated. So, much hinges on the business of narrators and narrating. Emma is a triumphant resolution of the problems set up by having the novel told largely by diegesis or narrative summary or substitutes for it. The characters have their own voices and the narrator creeps very close to ‘being Emma’s thought-process’. Oddly, this progressive moment for the English novel at the level of technique is also a moment of reaction and conservatism at the level of its ideological selling-points. But enough from me. Now you can get into a bit more detail as you explore the novels for yourself. It’s surely a fascinating theme you broach.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

The question you raise as to what sets me apart is interesting, partly because few tackle the subject head-on. Indeed, one might spend time pointing out how much cultural activity surrounding me fails to ‘prove’ that I was the transcendent genius—which of course, I was! For example, canonisation or validation ‘from below’ in the form of adaptations cannot automatically be held to ‘prove anything’—inferior texts often provide the material of successful adaptations. Many film and television programmes are popular but have no claims to cultural cachet, etc. Many of my admirers seem not to have been good literary judges in general. Books programmes like ‘The Big Read’ of recent notoriety seem to embody DVD or video experience, so results of those are to be suspected (I wasn’t engaged in making DVDs or videos).

A few points which might be explored, with reference to the truth which they might be held to contain are: subtlety in rendering consciousness and originality in the techniques I developed for doing this (it might help to step outside Austen criticism proper and look at a book like David Lodge’s After Bakhtin for a simplified account of sophisticated discussion of the language of novels here); a sense of weight of ethical implication and complexity; the demonstration of the interplay of the natural and the cultural, of love and capitalism, of desire and constraint, of feeling and reason; the rendering of a complex interplay of characters in terms of contrasting qualities and attitudes and the contrasting life-choices they excite; the way my novels cover the areas later explored by Freud (desire, sexuality), but in a sublimated, genteel way, and Marx (a sense of economic motivation or conditioning controls the action); a sense of dignity in interpersonal relationships, especially male-female ones, with formality of linguistic construction; a severe and sustained narrative logic; an epigrammatic style which makes the individual sentences and phrases interesting, unlike the doughy, rapid-rattle, passage-work writing of some later Victorian novelists like Trollope, who seem to write to the clock; a self-correcting progression of novels: Mansfield Park corrects the liveliness and ironies of Pride and Prejudice, action men in Persuasion correct an overemphasis on gentility and ‘social being’ in Emma;. serious analysis of society using sustained comic means; slashing satirical portraits of the social practices of the age which embody meanness, avarice, acquisitiveness, etc. Feminism: the plight of females in patriarchy –the sister pairings under pressure in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.

Can we take my writings as an essence or as self-correcting variety? Are they valued for the wrong reasons, as an escape into affluence rather than a critique of social shortcomings; implied breadth of social sympathy—‘Anglican’ assumptions, but with some rapport with radical poets like Blake and Shelley; visibly ideological, yet dealing subtly with political issues; beguiling linguistic pointillisme, which makes the inspection of my texts as demanding as poetry is generally understood to be; fairy tale plots containing realistic assessments of the people who ‘inhabit’ them; the ability to learn from and improve on brilliant predecessors (Johnson, Fielding, etc.). Will this do to be going on with? I’m rather tired today. They say ‘even Homer nods’; it should be ‘even Jane Austen nods’, I think!

With best wishes

Jane Austen.

I amuse myself these days by reading my commentators, and they seem to agree that my fiction is never based closely on events and persons in my own life. It would in any case be confusing to have flesh and blood people with all sorts of roles and narratives mixed up with men and women made out of words, sometimes of quite simple components: for both Lady Bertram and Mr. Rushworth in Mansfield, for example, the word ‘stupid’ covers a lot of the ground. Also my novels were very public affairs, read to and dramatised by my family and other animals (neighbours). I had to tread warily with reference to this issue you raise, of ‘depicting real people’.

And Mr Darcy wasn’t ever going to be the boy next door, exactly; as a very great landowner the nearest thing to Darcy in my life was my own elder brother Edward, promoted against the odds to the owner of great estates in Kent and Hampshire. But his character hardly models for that of Darcy (for example, as he had a touch of my mother’s hypochondria, Edward might in this respect be said to have been a bit like Mrs Bennet!) . Having said that, it does sound as if my mother might be a bit like Mrs B. herself, although, with her intellectual brilliance and practicality (like Mrs Croft in Persuasion, perhaps?), as well as in her aristocratic pretensions, she was hardly a silly, and socially lowly Mrs B.

Now, back to Darcy, and it seems he was an idealised type of the Great Landowner conceived of as having the welfare of a great many people to think of, and thinking of it, in beautiful Pemberley, in what will prove in some respects to be a fairy-tale novel which rescues Jane and Elizabeth, the eminently deserving Bennet sisters, from the horrors of the entail and unhappy attachments (or no attachments).

However, what we might also say is that my novel does reflect emotional patterns and structures of feeling in my own life. The two closely united and loving sisters, one called Jane, to be sure, cultivated but under-economic-pressure females, might be thought to be versions of myself and Cassandra, with Cassandra as Jane (part of the joke?), just as Elinor and Marianne, the impoverished but cultivated sister pair of the earlier Sense and Sensibility also shared something of our situation and temperaments. Perhaps Darcy and Bingley were fantasy-fulfilments for impoverished, clever females like myself and my elder sister Cassandra (I admired and loved her as much as Elizabeth did Jane, after all). But note that I bagged Darcy in that case! Cassandra was awarded handsome, rich, but puppy-like Charles!

With best wishes

Jane Austen.