Jane Austen died on this day 200 years ago. It is a testament to her genius that her words have continued to resonate for generations. Today, we celebrate her life by reflecting on what she had to say about love and happiness.

On Friday 4 August, the Which Jane Austen? exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries is closing to the public one half hour early. But why? What’s going to happen in that time?

When putting this exhibition together, Professor Kathryn Sutherland arranged for a few items to be borrowed from other, non-Bodleian collections: things that would help tell Austen’s story in detail, or to illustrate the breadth of ideas woven into the exhibition’s display cases.

Amongst these loan items is a manuscript of Sanditon, Austen’s final, unfinished novel, written entirely in her own hand. The manuscript comprises of three booklets, of which the third has been borrowed from King’s College Cambridge for our display.

One of Professor Sutherland’s captions as displayed alongside the manuscript.

Austen used brown gall ink to write this manuscript. This is a particularly sensitive ink, and there’s a risk of it fading when exposed to light for too long. While illumination in the Bodleian’s ST Lee gallery is carefully controlled, precautions are still taken to absolutely minimise any risk of harm to the valuable objects on display.

Having seen this manuscript in person, it can be honestly said just how moving it is to look directly upon the last words Austen crafted before her tragic, early death. There’s little surprise that this is such a popular item for display. Of course, this high demand means that the manuscript needs extra special care to avoid over-exposure or damage.

So when Which Jane Austen? closes 30 minutes early on 4 August, it’s for a page to be carefully turned in this important manuscript.

As is usual for loan items, staff from the host institution will be accompanied by a member of the lending institution - in this case, a member of King’s College, Cambridge will attend the Bodleian Libraries to oversee the page turning. The 4.30pm timing is a courtesy to our colleague from Cambridge, who will have a long journey to and from Oxford in order to make this appointment.

There is one more page turn scheduled for Sanditon in September, to ensure this popular, impressive and affecting example of Austen’s own handiwork remains intact and respectfully preserved.

Our first edition of Northanger Abbey comes with a short biographical notice of Austen’s death. As her sister felt, we have never looked upon her like again.

So I went on to study each of Austen’s six novels with that thought in mind. I concluded that none of them have courtship - that is, the assiduous attention of the hero to gaining the heroine’s hand - as a central and animating theme.

I am not arguing that Austen’s novels are not in form all romances in the tradition of Shakespearean comedy. Austen may undercut the “happy ever after” ending but she never denies her readers the satisfaction of believing that her heroines end up in happy and companionate marriages. (I would also argue that this is not a trivial matter, given the nature of women’s lives 200 years ago.)

But relegating Austen to the limited field of plots about “whether or not the heroine gets her man” is misleading and contributes to a continuing habit of belittling her achievement, especially in the broader context of popular culture.

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In Mansfield Park, the heroine, Fanny, watches the hero, Edmund, court another woman, while being courted by another man she has no interest in marrying.

In Persuasion, Austen’s last novel, the heroine Anne Elliot is in much the same situation. We know from the chapters of Persuasion that survive from her first draft, (which she later replaced) that Mr Elliot’s unwelcome courtship of Anne was originally to be the hinge on which the love plot turned.

Austen thought better of this clunky plot device and replaced it with the magnificent scene at the White Hart Inn, where the hero Captain Wentworth overhears a conversation between Anne and one of his friends that convinces him that she still loves him. This scene, setting the lovers’ reconciliation in the middle of the oblivious bustle of other people’s activity, takes Persuasion even further away from the traditions of the courtship novel.

In the early novels, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, Austen is playing with the form, satirising courtship behaviour and romantic meetings.

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Has Austen’s very popularity started to undermine her stature, as Camilla Nelson claims? Andrew Davies did not help with his imaginative fleshing-out of the narrative in his 1995 television screenplay for Pride and Prejudice. The series cemented Austen’s reputation with a whole generation as the author of simple Cinderella-style love stories which can be comprehended without actually reading a word of her novels.

Recently a friend described Austen’s novels to me as “perfect escapism”. I protested but she had a cogent argument: escapism doesn’t mean vapidity. Susan Chira made a similar point in the New York Times: “I wanted escape, but I needed moral resonance”.

Austen’s novels are an escape from an irrational and threatening world, yes, but the world they depict is no fairytale. For me, their appeal is more to do with how they are told than with what happens. The narrator’s witty, mature presence - her voice - brings us confidently through her tales of characters often living near the edge of poverty or unhappiness to the “happy ending” - happy, of course, only for a select few characters. (And this voice is the very thing that is almost impossible to convey in a film.)

Camilla Nelson says that Austen was not a feminist. I agree. She was more revolutionary than that. She assumed for her central female characters moral agency without reference to men. Not even the 17-year-old Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey thinks to ask her father or her brother how to behave. She only asks the advice of her host, Mr Allen,

to ease her mind, and ascertain by the opinion of an unprejudiced person what her own conduct had really been.

And in Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood, at 19, is by far the most mature person. It is taken absolutely for granted that these women are, or have the capacity to become, competent moral agents drawing only on their own intelligence and experience - and like many things taken for granted, it is easy to miss this startling fact.