Forget-me-nots

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Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.

I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!

A. MacIntyre, After Virtue

The radical premise of Austen's novels that distinguishes them so essentially from previous novels and makes them the original ancestors of so many later novels is that plot is not a threat to character, life not an assault on self. On the contrary, character and plot can be intertwined in a dynamic and positive relation, and part of the subject of the novels is how that relation can most positively be created and sustained. The notable absence of sexual definitions of character in Austen's novels is inextricable from their equally notable premise that experience is good. Austen's heroines are morally free to love the actual world. It's a wonderful life, full of the sights and sounds of the Musgrove's hotel room in Bath, full of Mrs. Jennings's earthy friendship and Miss Bates's love of Mr. Knightley's apples, full of the randomness of robbers in a turkey coop that can precipitate the "perfect happiness" of Emma's union. In fact, the novels positively argue that their heroines ought to love the world, that to do so need not mean to be worldly or materialistic or corrupt, to be Mrs. Selwyn or Moll Flanders or Lady Booby. What it might be instead, what the encounter with experience and the loss of innocence means when it is not defined in sexual terms, is the previously unexplored question that Austen's novels introduce into British fiction. To become experienced is a delightful and morally desirable activity, occurring perhaps in one crucial scene of illumination but also continuing the rest of one's life. Austen's heroines usually do lose their innocence, and the point is that they should. Indeed, they only earn the reward of the hero, often only know enough to want the hero, when they have successfully completed their passage.

S. Morgan, Sisters in Time

Her novels are a moral criticism of parents and of guardians quite as much as of young romantics; for the worst parents and guardians—the silly Mrs. Bennet and the irresponsible Mr. Bennet, for example—are what the romantic young may become if they do not learn what they ought to learn on the way to being married. (...) When Jane Austen speaks of ‘happiness’, she does so as an Aristotelian. (...) She thus turns away from the competing catalogues of the virtues of the eighteenth century and restores a teleological perspective. (...) The counterpart to Jane Austen’s preoccupation with the counterfeit is the central place she assigns to self-knowledge, a Christian rather than a Socratic self-knowledge which can only be achieved through a kind of repentance. In four of her six great novels there is a recognition scene in which the person whom the hero or heroine recognizes is him or herself. ‘Till this moment I never knew myself,’ says Elizabeth Bennet. ‘How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under!’ meditates Emma. (...) Jane Austen’s moral point of view and the narrative form of her novels coincide. The form of her novels is that of ironic comedy. Jane Austen writes comedy rather than tragedy for the same reason that Dante did; she is a Christian and she sees the telos of human life implicit in its everyday form. Her irony resides in the way that she makes her characters and her readers see and say more and other than they intended to, so that they and we correct ourselves. The virtues and the harms and evils which the virtues alone will overcome provide the structure both of a life in which the telos can be achieved and of a narrative in which the story of such a life can be unfolded. Once again it turns out that any specific account of the virtues presupposes an equally specific account of the narrative structure and unity of a human life and vice versa.

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