What was Jane Austen’s greatest novel? These specialists assume they know

To mark the 250th anniversary of her beginning, we’re pitting Jane Austen’s much-loved novels towards one another in a battle of wit, attraction and romance. Six main Austen specialists have made their case for her final novel, however the winner is right down to you. Cast your vote in the poll on the finish of the article, and tell us the rationale in your selection within the feedback. This is Jane Austen Fight Club – it’s bonnets at daybreak…

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Championed by Lucy Thompson, lecturer in Nineteenth-century literature and artistic writing, Aberystwyth University

Sense and Sensibility is Austen’s most quietly radical novel. As her first printed work, it could be much less polished than her later fiction, however it’s no much less incisive.

It lays naked the emotional value of dwelling in a world ruled by fame, household obligation and gendered expectation. Excluded from inheritance and displaced from their residence, the Dashwood sisters should navigate fixed scrutiny. Through Elinor and Marianne, Austen dramatises two methods for survival in a society obsessive about appearances.

Born from an earlier epistolary draft, the novel retains a pointy curiosity in how info circulates and misleads. Gossip doesn’t simply constrain; it distorts. Letters are spied upon, conversations overheard. Assumptions tackle the load of truth.

In this world, everybody watches – however not everybody really sees. Sense and Sensibility could put on a quieter face than Emma or Pride and Prejudice, however it’s Austen’s sharpest early critique of how appearances govern lives.

This article is a part of a collection commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s beginning. Despite having printed solely six books, she is without doubt one of the best-known authors in historical past. These articles discover the legacy and lifetime of this unimaginable author.

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Championed by Andrew McInnes, reader in English literature, Edge Hill University

Everyone already is aware of the very best Austen novel: Pride and Prejudice. Why? Elizabeth Bennet. Lizzy is so charismatic that you just would possibly mistake the novel’s title for an summary downside, and never Darcy’s pleasure versus her prejudice.

We share her prejudices as a result of Austen makes them so scrumptious. We roll our eyes at Mrs Bennet as a result of Lizzy finds her exasperating. Wickham is seductive as a result of he satisfies our inside bitch. And we fall in love with Darcy alongside Lizzy.

Pride and Prejudice is the funniest and sexiest of Austen’s novels. In it, she permits herself a swoon-worthy romance with no hitch. Unlike Northanger Abbey’s Henry Tilney, Darcy doesn’t fall in love as a result of Lizzy adores him, however falls first. Darcy is a fancy man – shy, domineering, humorous – and never a drip like Eds Ferrars (Sense and Sensibility) or Bertram (Mansfield Park). And not like Emma, Lizzy builds wholesome relationships with different girls.

Austen known as Pride and Prejudice “too light and bright and sparkling” and joked that it might do with an essay on Walter Scott or Napoleon. But we all know that might be a criminal offense. It is simply gentle and vivid and glowing sufficient to outshine the others.

Mansfield Park (1814)

Championed by Amanda Vickery, professor in early fashionable historical past, Queen Mary University of London

Pride and Prejudice is commonly the primary grown-up novel younger women learn, however Mansfield Park is the one Austen novel about a bit woman rising up.

All Austen’s fictions are variations of the female-centred courtship novel, normally masking a single yr, with the heroine safely married to a deserving gentleman by the final web page. Yet her heroines are principally shaped younger girls. Only in Mansfield Park can we meet our heroine as a bit woman – and a puny and cowering little woman at that.

Mansfield Park is Austen’s bildungsroman (the novel of turning into) on a par with that different women’ basic, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Like poor, plain Jane, Fanny Price is a woman of no consequence – a Cinderella determine in a mansion of the wealthy and egocentric.

Fanny is shy, frail and bodily timid, however she will not be an ethical coward. She learns to bear her lot with dignity, and to carry quick to what she believes. By quantity three, Fanny is finally the centre of her personal story. Mansfield Park is not only a love story, it’s a life story.

Emma (1815)

Championed by Ruvani Ranasinha, professor of worldwide literature, King’s College London

Emma Woodhouse is Jane Austen’s most vividly realised, proto-feminist heroine. Witty, intelligent and enticing, Emma is supremely self-confident and flawed. She challenges each expectation of feminine propriety and is filled with contradictions: self-centred but deeply connected to her hypochondriac, indulgent father; snobbish however form.

Emma revels in meddling within the romantic lives of others, particularly her protégée, Harriet Smith. When her fastidiously laid plans unravel, the busybody makes mortifying errors and learns self-knowledge: “It darted through her with the speed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no-one but herself!”

All Austen’s novels are shot by way of with the attention of the function of wealth and sophistication in marriage. But Emma – “an heiress of thirty thousand pounds” – is free from the extraordinary competitors among the many girls for younger males with positions and prospects. At the identical time, she attracts males like Mr Elton looking for girls with landed connections and dowries. This is why the novel each responds to Austen’s historic second and speaks to our personal.

Northanger Abbey (1817)

Championed by Octavia Cox, departmental lecturer in English literature, University of Oxford

Northanger Abbey is a riot of jokes. Nobody and nothing is spared: not the heroine, conference, society – even readers. There’s every little thing marvellous you’d anticipate from an Austen novel (sharp satire of patriarchy and socioeconomic weaponisation, laughter at human absurdity and pompousness, superbly wrought witty expression, a rollicking good yarn, irony), however with additional sass.

Its bombastic intrusive authorial narrative voice (maybe the closest we get to Austen’s personal), continually makes in-jokes with readers in regards to the motion. It’s Austen’s most meta-fictional textual content, taking part in with readers’ expectations about novels (for instance, joking that her novel, mockingly, “is a new circumstance in romance” regardless of depicting nothing “new in common life”).

Its “defence of the novel” passage is a proto-feminist rallying call-to-arms for feminine authors to have fun one another’s work. Northanger Abbey’s meta-fictionality reveals a lot about Austen’s goal and elegance as an writer, making it a must-read for all Austen-lovers. Oh, and it’s humorous. Damned humorous.

Persuasion (1817)

Championed by Richard de Ritter, lecturer in English literature, University of Leeds

Persuasion incorporates the best love letter in all English literature. It is the end result of a slow-burning romance between the heroine, Anne Elliot, and Captain Frederick Wentworth, the person she has liked for eight lengthy years. “You pierce my soul,” Wentworth writes to Anne with putting vulnerability: “I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late.” (Spoiler: he isn’t too late.)

The brilliance of Persuasion lies within the depiction of its advanced heroine. At 27, Anne Elliot is older and wiser than Austen’s earlier protagonists. Disregarded by her comically narcissistic household, the depth of Anne’s character is revealed by Austen’s prose fashion, which is at its most luminous and expressive. Readers are plunged into the thoughts of the novel’s heroine. We witness her innermost ideas and emotions as she negotiates the awkwardness, pleasure and, lastly, the sheer pleasure of embracing a future with Wentworth.

Persuasion is the ultimate novel that Austen accomplished earlier than her loss of life in 1817: she was on the peak of her powers. It is her most shifting and her best work.

Now the specialists have made their case, it’s your flip to determine which of Austen’s six accomplished novels is her greatest work. Vote within the ballot under to and see if our different readers agree with you.

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