Jane Austen is often heralded as the mother of modern
Romantic fiction, and on the surface this is a rather viable
epithet; her work includes handsome heroes and charming heroines, obstacles
blissfully overcome by
star crossed lovers, balls, parties, jealousies and secrets, occasionally the
aristocracy and inevitably money.
Which is where the comparison ends. While contemporary romantic novels are the products of a desire for escapism, Austen's books are impregnated to the full with social commentary and astute observations of the English middle classes in the Regency era. Money is such a prevailing meta-theme in her work because, to the well educated contemporaries of her own social class, it was an overriding concern more poingnant than Love.
At the time of the writing of her works, England was simultaneously booming and busting - the Empire was in a state of rapid expansion on the one hand, and the Napoleonic Wars were banckrupting the treasury and impeding import and export on the other. It is often remarked that although the Wars were raging at the time of the writing of virtually all of her novels, they are only explicitly mentioned in one. Yet the atmosphere of money easily made and lost, of social relationships having direct influence on people's career advancement, these things breathe the political and social climate of a country at war for its standing as a superpower - brought down to the level of the everyday person.
Jane Austen was an observer of human nature by supreme grace. She could pinpoint and describe the foibles and inadequacies of her fellow human beings in a few sparse yet beautiful words, a quality which is even more striking in her private correspondence, since presumably she did not work quite as hard on that as she did on her published works. Combined with a sense of social justice and reform (she was staunchly anti-slavery) this makes her books much more than romantic fluff in Empire line dresses - it makes them an incomprable, indeed unique, glimpse into the state of mind of a nation.
Despite the value of her work as a historical document, much of it is still relevant to readers today. Austen characterisation has not palled with time, and her obvious pleasure in ridiculing what she considered reprehensible traits in her generation - hypocrisy, avarice, impiety, overindulgence - only serves to enhance the pleasure of the reader in adapting her personalities and applying her aphorisms to modern day acquaintances.
Every one of Austen's novels deals in some way with values which were taken for granted in her time: family honour, personal integrity, education, romantic love, correct manners. Yet in every one she subverts the theme and shows that the real value of these ethics does not lie in the fashionable pretence of upholding them. Mr. Darcy's family conceit gives way to the superior nature of true attachment; Marianne Dashwood's extravagant affections are exposed as inferior to her syster's more steady and reserved conduct; Lady Russel's notions of marriage within a social class are made to give way before personal merit; Sir Thomas's prudential yet indulgent education of his daughters is shown to be an insufficient and hollow basis for true morality and strength of character.
Jane Austen has often been accused of being a people hater, one who delighted in ridiculing and compromising her characters. My belief is that these accusations fail to take into account both Austen's background and the tenor of her body of work as a whole. At the time she was being educated, the novel was a relatively new form of art in the English language, and was widely considered frivolous and inferior to poetry in its aesthetic merit and to moralistic prose in its social and educational value. When she was growing up, she was probably encouraged to read collections of sermons and essays on religion, the great poets and dramatists, accounts of famous travellers, historical texts and philosophical tractates - all materials that her two most well educated heroines, Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, are mentioned as having read at one time or another. She therefore could not have considered her own work as a novelist of much value, and indeed was much surprised and delighted when Pride and Prejudice was accepted for publication.
She could not, therefore, and in fact did not, mean only to entertain. She had a sound educational purpose for writing her novels, and for writing them the way she wrote them - in a multy-layered fashion that will allow her audience to at once enjoy them and learn from them. She was a reforming moralist, probably one of the finest of her age, and this desire to inform came from nothing less than a profound belief in the essentially good nature of Man and a deep affection for those subjects she seemed on the surface to condemn. This is why I never fail to be heartened, uplifted even, by her prose.